





"% 4' 



\ . * 






^^ii^^/y.sSK' ,^ 



^\^ 



,0 



5 -t:, >• ^:;:- 






^>. 



-^ 






^^^. <^^' .•^^W^'^''- 



o. 



oo^ 






v, 



'^■•\^ 



8 , \ " _^ 






.V '^. 



'«. ^V ^-^ ^^^ <^^ <^ ^^ 






^'A 


^ 


c,^- . 


> 


cP -^ 


V 


,j^ = 




■> 




C^ 




O 




-/^ 



o. 






o 



AN [NTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 



•The 




THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO 
SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



Mr, WILLIAM' 



COMEDIES, 
HI8TORfE:> 




L .9^'D :X^ 
Tih^cdhy I£^ac laggard, an J Ed.BI 



TITLE-PAGE OF THE FIEST FOLIO, 1623 
The first collected edition of Shakespeare's Plays 
(From the copy in the New York Public Library) 



AN INTRODUCTION TO 
SHAKESPEARE 



BY 

H. N. MacCRACKEN, Ph.D. 
F. E. PIERCE, Ph.D. 

AND 

W. H. DURHAM, Ph.D. 

OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN 

THE SHEFFIELD SCIENTIFIC SCHOOL OF 

TALE UNIVERSITY 



NeiD gork 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1916 

AU rights reserved 






Copyright, 1910, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1910. Reprinted 
April, December, 1911 ; September, 1912 ; July, 1913 ; August, 1914 
December, 1915 ; November, 1916. 






Norijjooto iPresa 

J. S. Gushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



PREFACE 

The advances made in Shakespearean scholarship 
within the last half-dozen years seem to justify the 
writing of another manual for school and college use. 
The studies of Wallace in the life-records, of Louns- 
bury in the history of editions, of Pollard and Greg 
in early quartos, of Lee upon the First Folio, of Al- 
bright and others upon the Elizabethan Theater, as 
well as valuable monographs on individual plays have 
all appeared since the last Shakespeare manual was 
prepared. This little volume aims to present what 
may be necessary for the majority of classes, as a 
background upon which may be begun the study and 
reading of the plays. Critical comment on individual 
plays has been added, in the hope that it may stimu- 
late interest in other plays than those assigned for 
study. 

Chapters I, VIII, IX, X, and XIII are the work 
of Professor MacCracken ; chapters Y, VI, VII, XII, 
and XIV are by Professor Pierce; and chapters II, 
III, IV, and XI are by Dr. Durham. The authors 
have, however, united in the criticism and the revision 
of every chapter. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I 

PAGE 

An Outline of Shakespeare's Life • • • 1 

CHAPTER n 
English Drama before Shakespeare • . • 20 

CHAPTER ni 
The Elizabethan Theater 35 

CHAPTER rV 
Elizabethan London 51 

CHAPTER V 
Shakespeare's Nondramatic Works ... 60 

CHAPTER VI 
The Sequence of Shakespeare's Plays • • 73 

CHAPTER Vn 
Shakespeare's Development as a Dramatist . 85 

CHAPTER Vin 

The Chief Sources of Shakespeare's Plays . 105 

vii 



viii CONTENTS 

CHAPTER IX 
How Shakespeare got into Print • • • 113 

CHAPTER X 

The Plays of the First Period — Imitation and 

Experiment 131 

CHAPTER XI 

The Plays of the Second Period — Comedy and 

History 153 

CHAPTER XII 
The Plays of the Third Period — Tragedy . 172 

CHAPTER XIII 
The Plays of the Fourth Period — Romance . 19^^ 

CHAPTER XIV 

Some Famous Mistakes and Delusions about 

&;jakespeare 210 



AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 



AN INTRODUCTION TO 
SHAKESPEARE 

CHAPTER I 

AN OUTLINE OF SHAKESPEARE's LIFE 

Our Knowledge of Shakespeare. — No one in Shake- 
speare's day seems to have been interested in learning 
about the private lives of the dramatists. The pro- 
fession of play writing had scarcely begun to be dis- 
tinguished from that of play acting, and the times 
■were not wholly gone by when all actors had been 
classed in public estimation as vagabonds. While the 
London citizens were constant theatergoers, and im- 
mensely proud of their fine plays, they were content 
to learn of the writers of plays merely from town 
gossip, which passed from lip to lip and found no 
resting place in memoirs. There were other lives 
which made far more exciting reading. English sea- 
men were penetrating every ocean, and bringing back 
wonderful tales. English soldiers were aiding the 
Dutch nation towards freedom, and coming back full 
of stories of heroic deeds. At home great political, 
religious, and scientific movements engaged the atten- 
tion of the more serious readers and thinkers. It is 
not strange, therefore, that the writers of plays, whose 

B 1 



2 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

most exciting incidents were tavern brawls or im- 
prisonment for rash satire of the government, found 
no biographer. After Shakespeare's death, moreover, 
the theater rapidly fell into disrepute, and many a 
good story of the playhouse fell under the ban of 
polite conversation, and was lost. 

Under such conditions we cannot wonder that we 
know so little of Shakespeare, and that we must go 
to town records, cases at law, and book registers for 
our knowledge. Thanks to the diligence of modern 
scholars, however, we know much more of Shakespeare 
than of most of his fellow-actors and playwrights. The 
life of Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare's great pred- 
ecessor, is almost unknown ; and of John Fletcher, 
Shakespeare's great contemporary and successor, it is 
not even knowa whether he was married, or when he 
began to write plays. Yet his father was Bishop of 
London, and in high favor with Queen Elizabeth. We 
ought rather to wonder at the good fortune which has 
preserved for us, however scanty in details or lack- 
ing in the authority of its traditions, a continuous rec- 
ord of the life of William Shakespeare from birth to 
death. 

Stratford. — The notice of baptism on April 26, 1564, 
of William, son of John Shakespeare, appears in the 
church records of Stratford-on-Avon in Warwickshire. 
Stratford was then a market town of about fifteen 
hundred souls. Under Stratford Market Cross the 
farmers of northern Warwickshire and of the near- 
lying portions of Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, and 
Oxfordshire carried on a brisk trade with the thrifty 
townspeople. The citizens were accustomed to boast 



AN OUTLINE OF SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE 3 

of their beautiful church, by the river, and of the fine 
Guildhall, where sometimes plays were given by trav- 
eling companies. Many of their gable-roofed houses 
of timber, or timber and plaster, are still to be found 
on the pleasant old streets. The river Avon winds 
round the town in a broad reach under the many-arched 
bridge to the ancient church. Beyond it the rich 
pasture land rises up to green wooded hills. Not far 
away is the famous Warwick Castle, and a little be- 
yond it Kenilworth, where Queen Elizabeth was en- 
tertained by the Earl of Leicester with great festivi- 
ties in 1575. Coventry and E-ugby are the nearest 
towns. 

Birth and Parentage. — The record of baptism of 
April 26, 1564, is the only evidence we possess of the 
date of Shakespeare's birth. It is probable that the 
child was baptized when only two or three days old. 
The poet's tomb states that Shakespeare was in his 
fifty-second year when he died, April 23, 1616. Ac- 
cepting this as strictly true, we cannot place the poet's 
birthday earlier than April 23, 1564. There is a tra- 
dition, with no authority, that the poet died upon his 
birthday. 

John Shakespeare, the poet's father, sold the prod- 
ucts of near-by farms to his fellow-townsmen. He is 
sometimes described as a glover, sometimes as a 
butcher ; very likely he was both. A single reference, 
half a century later than his day, preserves for us a 
picture of John Shakespeare. The note reads : " He 
[William Shakespeare] was a glover's son. Sir John 
Mennes saw once his old father in his shop, a merry- 
cheekt old man, that said, * Will was a good honest 



4 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

fellow, but lie durst have crackt a jesst with, him att 
any time.' " ^ 

John Shakespeare's father, Richard Shakespeare, 
was a tenant farmer, who was in 1550 renting his little 
farm at Snitterfield, four miles north of Stratford, 
from another farmer, Robert Arden of Wilmcote. 
John Shakespeare married Mary Arden, the daughter 
of his father's rich landlord, probably in 1557. He 
had for over five years been a middleman at Stratford, 
dealing in the produce of his father's farm and other 
farms in the neighborhood. In April, 1552, we first 
hear of him in Stratford records, though only as being 
fined a shilling for not keeping his yard clean. Be- 
tween 1557 and 1561 he rose to be ale tester (in- 
spector of bread and malt), burgess (petty constable), 
affeeror (adjuster of fines), and finally city chamber- 
lain (treasurer). 

Eight children were born to him, the two eldest, 
both daughters, dying in infancy. William Shake- 
speare was the third child, and eldest of those who 
reached maturityo During his childhood his father 
was probably in comfortable circumstances, but not 
long before the son left Stratford for London, John 
Shakespeare was practically a bankrupt, and had lost 
by mortgage farms in Snitterfield and Ashbies, near 
by, inherited in 1556 by his wife. 

Education. — William Shakespeare probably went 
to the Stratford Grammar School, where he and his 

iThis reference was discovered among the Plume Mss. (1657- 
1663) of Maldon, Essex, by Dr. Andrew Clark, in October, 1904. Sir 
John Mennes was, however, not a contemporary of John Shake- 
speare, but doubtless merely passed on the description from some 
eyewitness. 



AN OUTLINE OF SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE 5 

brothers as the sons of a town councilor were entitled 
to free tuition. His masters, no doubt, taught him 
Lilly's Latin Grammar and the Latin classics, — Virgil, 
Horace, Ovid, Cicero, Seneca, and the rest, — and very 
little else. If Shakespeare ever knew French or 
Italian, he picked it up in London life, where he picked 
up most of his amazing stock of information on all 
subjects. Besides Latin, he must have read and 
memorized a good deal of the English Bible. 

Marriage. — In the autumn of 1582 the eighteen- 
year-old Shakespeare married a young woman of 
twenty-six. On November 28, of that year two 
farmers of Shottery, near Stratford, signed what we 
should call a guarantee bond, agreeing to pay to the 
Bishop's Court £40, in case the marriage proposed 
between William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway 
should turn out to be contrary to the canon — or Church 
— law, and so invalid. This guarantee bond, no doubt, 
was issued to facilitate and hasten the wedding. On 
May 26, 1583, Shakespeare's first child, Susanna, was 
baptized. His only other children, his son Hamnet 
and a twin daughter Judith, were baptized February 
2, 1584-5 ^ It is probable that soon after this date 
Shakespeare went to London and began his career as 
actor, and afterwards as writer of plays and owner of 
theaters. 

1 The dates between January 1 and March 25, previous to 1752, 

are always thus written. In 1752 England and its colonies decided 
to begin the year with January 1 instead of March 25, as formerly. 
Thus for periods before that date between January 1 and March 
25, we give two figures to indicate that the people of that time 
called it one year and we call it a year later. Thus, Judith 
Shakespeare would have said she was baptized in 1584, while by 
our reckoning her baptism came in 1585. 



6 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

Anne Hathaway, as we have said, was eight years 
older than her husband. She was the daughter of a 
small farmer at Shottery, a little out of Stratford, 
whose house is still an object of pilgrimage for 
Shakespeare lovers. We have really no just ground 
for inferring, from the poet's early departure for 
London, that his married life was unhappy. The 
Duke in Twelfth Night (lY, iii) advises Viola against 
women's marrying men younger than themselves, it is 
true ; but such advice is conventional. No one can 
tell how much the dramatist really felt of the thoughts 
which his characters utter. Who would guess from 
any words in I Henry IV, for instance, a play contain- 
ing some of his richest humor and freest joy in life, 
that, in the very year of its composition, Shakespeare 
was mourning the death of his little son Hamnet, and 
that his hopes of founding a family were at an end ? 
Another piece of evidence, far more important, is the 
fact that Shakespeare does not mention his wife at all 
'in his will, except by an interlined bequest of his 
^' second-best bedroom set." But here, again, it is easy 
to misread the motives of the man who makes a will. 
Such omissions have been made when no slight was 
intended, sometimes because of previous private 
settlements, sometimes because a wife is always en- 
titled to her dower rights. The evidence is thus too 
slight to be of value. 

Some other motive, then, than unhappiness in 
married life ought to be assigned for Shakespeare's 
departure to London. No doubt, the fact that his 
father was now a discredited bankrupt, against whom 
suits were pending, had something to do with his 



AN OUTLINE OF SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE 7 

decision to better Ms family fortunes in another town. 
Traveling companies of players may have told him 
of London life. Possibly some scrape, like that pre- 
served in the deer-stealing tradition and the resultant 
persecution, made the young man, now only twenty- 
one, restive and eager to be gone. 

The Tradition concerning Deer Stealing. — Nicholas 
Kowe, in 1709, in his edition of Shakespeare says: "He 
had by a misfortune common enough to young fellows 
fallen into bad company, and among them, some that 
made a frequent practice of deer stealing, engaged 
him with them more than once in robbing a park that 
belonged to Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote near Strat- 
ford. For this he was persecuted by that gentleman, 
as he thought, somewhat too severely ; and, in order 
to revenge that ill-usage, he made a parody upon him; 
and though this, probably the first essay of his poetry, 
be lost, yet it is said to have been so very bitter that 
he was obliged to leave his business and family in 
Warwickshire and shelter himself in London.'' Arch- 
deacon Davies of Saperton, Gloucestershire, in the late 
seventeenth century testifies independently to the 
same tradition. Justice Shallow in the Merry Wives 
of Windsor is on this latter authority to be identified 
with Sir Thomas Lucy. He is represented in the play 
as having come from Gloucester to Windsor. He 
" will make a Star Chamber matter of it " that Sir 
John Falstaff has "defied my men, killed my deer, 
and broke open my lodge." He bears on his "old 
coat" (of arms) a " dozen white luces " (small fishes), 
and there is a lot of chatter about " quartering " this 
coat, which is without point unless a pun is intended. 



8 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

Now " three luces Hauriant argent '^ were the arms of 
the Charlecote Lucys, it is certain. There is some rea- 
son then, for connecting Shallow with Sir Thomas Lucy, 
and an apparent basis for the deer-stealing tradition, 
although the incident in the play may, of course, have 
suggested the myth. Davies goes on to say that 
Shakespeare was whipped and imprisoned; for this 
there is no other evidence. 

Early Life in London. — The earliest known refer- 
ence to Shakespeare in the world of London is con- 
tained in a sarcastic allusion from the pen of Robert 
Greene, the poet and play writer, who died in 1592. 
Greene was furiously jealous of the rapidly increasing 
fame of the newcomer. In a most extravagant style 
he warns his contemporaries (Marlowe, Nash, and 
Peele, probably) to beware of young men that seek 
fame by thieving from their masters. They, too, like 
himself, will suffer from such thieves. "Yes, trust 
them not ; for there is an upstart crow beautified with 
our feathers that, with his Tygers heart wrapt in a 
Players hide, supposes he is as well able to bumbast 
out a blank verse as the best of you ; and being an 
absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his owne conceit the 
onely Shakescene in a countrie . . . but it is pittie men 
of such rare wit should be subject to the pleasures of 
such rude grooms." The reference to " Shakescene" 
and the "Tygers heart," which is a quotation from 
III Henry VI,^ makes it almost certain that Shake- 
speare and his play are referred to. Greene's attack 
was, however, an instance of what Shakespeare would 

1**0 tiger'sheart wrapped in a woman's hide." This line is also 
in the source of Shakespeare's play. See p 133. 



AN OUTLINE OF SHAKESPEARE S LIFE 9 

have called " spleen/' and not to be taken as a general 
opinion. His hint of " Johannes Factotum " ( Jack-of- 
all-Trades) probably means that Shakespeare was 
willing to undertake any sort of dramatic work. Later 
on in the same letter (A Groatsworth of Witte Bought 
with a Million of Repeiitancey he calls the " upstart 
crow'' and his like "Buckram gentlemen/' and 
" peasants." 

Henry Chettle, a friend of Greene's, either in Decem- 
ber, 1592, or early in 1593/ published an address 
as a preface to his Kind-Harts Dreame, making a pub- 
lic apology to Shakespeare for allowing Greene's letter 
to come out with this insulting attack. He says ; 
"With neither of them that take offence was I 
acquainted, and with one of them I care not if I never 
be. The other [generally taken to be Shakespeare] 
whome at one time I did not so much spare as since I 
wish I had, for that, as I have moderated the heate of 
living writers, and might have usde my owne discretion 
— especially in such a case, the author beeing dead, — 
that I did not I am as sory as if the originall fault 
had beene my fault, because myself have scene his 
demeanor no lesse civill, than he exelent in the qual- 
itie he professes; — besides divers of worship have 
reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his 
honesty, and his facetious grace in writing, that aprooves 
his art. . . ." 

There is, then, testimony from two sources that by 
1592 Shakespeare was an excellent actor, a graceful 
poet, and a writer of plays that aroused the envy of 

1 Printed first in 1596, but written shortly before Greene's death 
in 1592. 2 Registered Dec, 1592, but printed without date. 



10 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

one of the best dramatists of his day. Obviously, al\ 
this could not have happened in a few months, and we 
are therefore justified in believing that Shakespeare 
came to London soon after 1585, very likely in 1586. 

Later Allusions. — In 1593 the title-page of Venus 
and Adonis shows that a great English earl and patron 
of the arts was willing to be godfather " to the first 
heyre '^ of Shakespeare's " invention,^^ his first pub- 
lished poem. In 1594 Shakespeare also dedicated to 
Southampton his Lucrece, in terms of greater intimacy, 
though no less respect. On December 27, 1595, Ed- 
mund Spenser's Colin Clout's Come Home Againe con- 
tained a reference which is now generally believed to 
allude to Shakespeare. 

*' And there, though last not least, is ^tion ; 
A gentler shepheard may nowhere be found ; 
Whose Muse, full of high thoughts' invention, 
Doth like himself e heroically sound." 

The next important reference is from Palladis Tamia, 
by Erancis Meres (1598) : — 

" As the soule of Euphorbus was thought to live in 
Pythagoras, so the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in 
mellifluous and hony-tongued Shakespeare; witness 
his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets 
among his private friends &c. As Plautus and Seneca 
are accounted the best for comedy and Tragedy among 
the Latines, so Shakespeare among the English is the 
most excellent in both kinds for the stage ; for comedy, 
witnes his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Loves 
Labors Lost, his Love Labours Wonne, his Midsummer 
Night Dreame, and his Merchant of Venice; for trag- 
edy his Richard the 2., Richard the 3., Henry the 4., 



AN OUTLINE OF SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE 11 

King Jolin, Titus Andronicus, and his E,omeo and 
Juliet. As Epius Stolo said that the Muses would 
speake with Plautus tongue, if they would speak Latin, 
so I say that the Muses would speak with Shakespeare's 
fine filed phrase, if they would speak English. And 
as Horace saith of his ; Exegi monumentum aere 
perennius, 'RegaXique situ pyramidum altius. 

" Quod non imber edax : Non Aquilo impotiu^possit 
diruere: aut innumerabilis annorum series et fuga 
temporum : so say I severally of Sir Philip Sidneys 
Spencers Daniels Draytons Shakespeares and Warners 
workes." 

This is the earliest claim for the supremacy of 
Shakespeare in the English theater, a claim never 
seriously disputed from that day to this. The numer- 
ous other contemporary allusions to Shakespeare's 
fame, which fill the Shakespeare Allusion Book, ^ add 
nothing to our purpose; but merely confirm the state- 
ment that throughout his life his readers knew and 
admitted his worth. The chorus of praise continued 
from people of all classes. John Weever, the epigram- 
matist, and E-ichard Camden, the antiquarian, praised 
Shakespeare highly, and Michael Drayton, the poet, 
called him ''perfection in a man." Finally, Ben 
Jonson, his most famous competitor for public applause, 
crowned our poet's fame with his poem, prefixed to 
the first collected edition of Shakespeare's famous 
First Folio of 1623 : " To the Memory of my beloved, 
the author, Mr. William Shakespeare, and what he 
hath left us. 

1 These may be seen, as well as all others up to 1700, in the re« 
edited Shakespeare Allusion Book, ed. J. Munro, London, 1909. 



12 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 
*' He was not of an age, "but for all time ! " 

Shakespeare as an Actor. — Tlie allusion quoted above 
of Henry Chettle praises Shakespeare's excellence 
" in the qualitie he professes." Stronger evidence is 
afforded by some of the title-pages of plays printed 
during the poet's life. Thus Ben Jonson's Every 
Man in his Humour says on its title-page : " Every 
One in his Timor. This comedie was first Acted in 
the yeere 1598 by the then L. Chamberleyne his serv- 
ants. The principal comedians were Will. Shake- 
speare, Aug. Philips, Hen. Condel, Will. Slye, Will. 
Kempe, Ric. Burbadge, Joh. Hemings, Tho. Pope, 
Chr. Beeston, Joh. Dyke, withe the allowance of the 
Master of Reuells." 

Before this his name had appeared between those of 
Kemp and Burbage (named in the above list), the one 
the chief comedian, the other the chief tragedian of 
the time, in comedies which were acted before the 
Queen on December 27 and 28, 1594, at Greenwich 
Palace. The titles of these comedies are not given in 
the Treasurer's Accounts of the Chamber, from which 
we take the list of players. 

In 1603, Shakespeare shared with Burbage the 
headline of the list of actors in Ben Jonson's tragedy 
jSejanus. That he thoroughly understood the tech- 
nique of his art and was interested in it, is evident 
from Hamlet's advice to the players. Throughout his 
life in London, Shakespeare was a member of the 
company usually known as the Lord Chamberlain's 
Company.^ 

iSeep. 48. 



AN OUTLINE OF SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE 13 

Shakespeare and the Mountjoys. — The most impor- 
tant addition of recent years to the life records of 
Shakespeare is that made by an American scholar, Pro- 
fessor Charles William Wallace. He has unearthed in 
the Public Record Office at London a notable bundle of 
documents — twenty-six in all. They concern a lawsuit 
in which the family of Christopher Mountjoy, Shake- 
speare's landlord in London, was engaged ; and in 
which the poet himself appeared as a witness. Mount- 
joy, it appears, was a prosperous wigmaker and hair- 
dresser, and, no doubt, had good custom from the 
London actors. Shakespeare had lodgings in Mount- 
joy's house in the year 1604, and at Madame Mountjoy's 
request acted as intermediary in proposing to young 
Stephen Bellott, a young French apprentice of Mount- 
joy's, that if he should marry his master's daughter 
Mary, he would receive £50 as dowry and " certain 
household stuff" in addition. The marriage took 
place, and the quarrel which led to the lawsuit 
in 1612 was chiefly about the fulfillment — or non- 
fulfillment — of the marriage settlements. Shake- 
speare's testimony on the matter is clear enough in 
regard to his services as the friend of both parties ; but 
his memory leaves him when specific information is 
required touching the exact terms of the dowry. Evi- 
dently he had no mind that his old landlord should 
suffer from the claims of his unruly son-in-law. 

Mountjoy's house was situated in an ancient and 
most respectable neighborhood in Cripplegate ward, on 
the corner of Silver Street and Mugwell, or Muggle 
Street. Near by dwelt many of Shakespeare's fellow- 
actors and dramatists, St. Paul's Cathedral^ the heart 



14 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

of London, lay five minutes' walk to the southwest 
The length of Shakespeare's residence with the worthy 
Huguenot family is not to be learned from the recent 
discoveries ; but his testimony to Bellott's faithful 
service as apprentice throughout the years of appren- 
ticeship — 1598-1604 — makes it strongly probable that 
during these years, when the poet was writing his 
greatest plays, he lodged with Mount joy. In 1612 
Mount] oy, according to another witness, had a lodger 
— a " sojourner" — in his house; this may mean that 
Shakespeare was still in possession of his rooms in the 
house on Silver Street. If it be so, no spot in the world 
has been the birthplace of a greater number of master- 
pieces. 

It is interesting to note, in passing, that the various 
witnesses in the Mount joy lawsuit who have occasion 
to speak of Shakespeare always refer to him most re- 
spectfully. The poet was evidently high in the esteem 
of his neighbors. 

Shakespeare's Income and Business Transactions. — 
Shakespeare was a shrewd and sensible man of busi- 
ness. He amassed during his career in London a prop- 
erty nearly, if not quite, as great as any made by his 
profession at the time. In addition to profits from 
the sale of his plays to managers (he probably derived 
no income from their publication), and his salary as 
an actor, Shakespeare enjoyed an ample income from 
his shares in the Blackfriars and Globe theaters, of 
which he became joint owner with the Burbage brothers 
and other fellow-actors in 1597 and 1599. Professor 
Wallace has discovered a document which helps, though 
very slightly, to enable us to judge what his income 



AN OUTLINE OF SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE 15 

from these sources may have been.^ In 1615-1616 the 
widow of one of the proprietors of the two theaters, 
whose share, like Shakespeare's, was one-seventh of the 
Blackfriars, one-fourteenth of the Globe, brought suit 
against her father. She asked for £600 damages for 
her father's wrongful detention of her year's income, 
amounting to £300 from each theater. 

But damages asked in court are always high, and in- 
clude fees of lawyers and other items. The probability 
is that Shakespeare's yearly income from these sources 
was never over £500. To this, though the figures 
cannot be ascertained with any degree of certainty, we 
might add £100 for salary and £25 for plays yearly. 
The total would amount to fully £600 a year from 
1599 on till 1611, about which date Shakespeare prob- 
ably retired to Stratford. If we reckon by what money 
will buy in our days, we may say that Shakespeare's 
yearly income at the height of success was ^25,000, in 
round numbers. This is certainly a low estimate, and 
does not include extra court performances and the like, 
from which he must certainly have profited. 

Shakespeare's Life in London. — What with the com- 
position of two plays a year, continual rehearsals, and 
performances of his own and other plays, Shakespeare's 
life must have been a busy one. Tradition, however, 
accords him an easy enjoyment of the pleasures of the 
time ; and his own sarcastic remarks against Puritans 
in his plays may indicate a hatred of puritanical re- 
straint. Hemust have joined in many a merry feast 
with the other actors and writers of the day, and with 
court gallants. The inventory of property left by him 
1 See the New York Times for October 3, 1909. 



16 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

at his death indicates that while he had accumulated a 
good estate, he had also lived generously. 

Stratford Affairs and Shakespeare's Return. — While 
William Shakespeare was thus employed in London 
in building up name and fortune for himself, his 
father was in financial straits. As early as January, 
1586, John Shakespeare had no property on which a 
creditor could place a lien. In September of the same 
year, he was deprived of his alderman's gown for lack 
of attention to town business. During the next year 
he was sued for debt, and had to produce a writ of 
habeas corpus to keep himself out of jail. In 1599 he 
tried to recover his wife's mortgaged property of Ash- 
bies from the mortgagee's heir, John Lambert, but 
the suit was not tried till eight years later. Soon 
after this the son must have begun to send to Strat- 
ford substantial support. In 1592 John Shakespeare 
was made an appraiser of the property of Henry Field, 
a fellow-townsman. Henry Field's son Richard pub- 
lished Venus and Adonis for Shakespeare in 1593, 
from his shop in St. Paul's Churchyard. From this 
time John Shakespeare seems to have lived in com- 
fort. His ambition to secure the grant of a coat of 
arms was almost successful at his first application 
for one in October, 1596 ; three years later the grant 
was made, and his son and he were now " Gentle- 
men." 

In May, 1597, William Shakespeare bought New 
Place, a handsome house in the heart of Stratford, 
and at once became an influential citizen. From that 
time to his death he is continually mentioned in the 
town records. His purchases included 107 acres in 



AN' OUTLINE OF SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE 17 

Old Stratford (May 1, 1602), for £320 ; the right to 
farm the Stratford tithes (July 24, 1605), for £440 ; 
an estate of the Combe family (April 13, 1610), and 
minor properties. In all his dealings, so far as we 
can tell, he seems to have been shrewd and business- 
like. 

Little is known of Shakespeare's children during 
these years. Hamnet, his only son, was buried Au- 
gust 11, 1596. Susanna, the eldest daughter, married 
a physician. Dr. John Hall, of Stratford, June 5, 1607 ; 
Judith married Thomas Quiney, son of an old Strat- 
ford friend of Shakespeare's, February 10, 1616, two 
months before her father's death. Shakespeare's 
father had died long before this, in September, 1601. 

Shakespeare's retirement from London to his na- 
tive town is thought to have taken place about 1611, 
though there is no real evidence for this belief, except 
that his play writing probably ceased about this date. 
In 1614 a Puritan preacher stopped at New Place and 
was entertained there by the poet's family. It is cer- 
tain that Shakespeare visited London from time to 
time after 1611. One such visit is recorded in the 
diary of his lawyer, Thomas Greene, of Stratford. As 
late as March 24, 1613, there occurs an entry in the 
accounts of the Earl of Rutland of a payment to 
Shakespeare and Richard Burbage of 44 shillings each 
in gold for getting up a dramatic entertainment for the 
Earl of Rutland. 

In 1616 Shakespeare's health failed. On January 
25, a copy of his will was drawn, which was executed 
March 25. On April 23, 1616, he died, and two days 
later was buried in the chancel of Stratford church. 



18 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

Shakespeare's Portraits, Tomb, and Descendants. — Two pon 

traits, the "Ely Palace " and the "Flower" portraits, so called 
from former possessors, are thought to have better claims to au- 
thenticity than others. New discoveries are announced, period- 
ically, of Shakespeare's portrait ; but these turn out usually to 
be forgeries. The engraving by Martin Droeshout prefixed to 
the First and later Folios, though to us it seems unanimated 
and unnatural, is still the only likeness vouched for by contem- 
poraries. It is thought by many to be a copy of the "Flower " 
portrait, which bears the date 1609, and which it certainly very 
closely resembles. If the Stratford bust which was placed in a 
niche above Shakespeare's tomb in Stratford church before 
1623 was accurately reproduced in Dugdale's Warwickshire, 
then the present bust is a later substitution, since it shows dif- 
ferences in detail from that sketch. It is coming to be believed 
that the eighteenth-century restoration so altered the bust as to 
make it quite unlike its former appearance. 

Shakespeare's grave is in the chancel of Stratford church. A 
dark, flat tombstone bears the inscription, which early tradition 
ascribes to the poet : — 

"Good frend, for lesvs sake forbeare 
To digg the dvst enclosed heare : 
Bleste be y^ man y* spares thes stones, 
And curst be he y* moves my bones." 

The monument to Shakespeare, with the bust on the north waU, 
is facing the tomb. 

In his will, Shakespeare provided that much the larger por- 
tion of his estate should go to his eldest daughter, Susanna Hall 
and John Hall, Gent., her husband, including New Place, 
Henley Street and Blackfriars houses, and his tithes in Strat- 
ford and near-by villages. This was in accordance with custom. 
To Judith, his younger daughter, the wife of Thomas Quiney, 
he left three hundred pounds, one hundred as a marriage por- 
tion, fifty more on her release of her right in a Stratford tene- 
ment, and the rest to be paid in three years, the principal to be 
invested, the interest paid to her, and the principal to be divided 
at her death. 



AN OUTLINE OF SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE 19 

Shakespeare left his sister, Joan Hart, £20 and his wearing 
apparel, and her house in Stratford rent-free till her death, at 
a shilling a year. His plate he divided between his daughters. 
The minor bequests, which include £10 to the Stratford poor, 
are chiefly notable for the bequest of money (265. Sd.) for rings 
to "my fellowes, John Hemynges, Kichard Burbage, and 
Henry Cundell." These were fellow-actors in the Lord Cham- 
berlain's Company, 

Within half a century Shakespeare's line was extinct. His 
wife died August 6, 1623. His daughter Susanna left one 
daughter, Elizabeth, who married, April 22, 1626, Thomas 
Nashe, who died April 4, 1647. On June 5, 1649, she married 
John Barnard of Abington, Northamptonshire, afterwards 
knighted. She left no children by either marriage. Her burial 
was recorded February 17, 1669-70. Shakespeare's daughter 
Judith had three sons, — Shakespeare, baptized November 23, 
1616, buried May 8, 1617 ; Kichard, baptized February 9, 
1617-8, buried February 16, 1638-9 ; Thomas, baptized January 
23, 1619-20, buried January 1638-9. Judith Shakespeare sur- 
vived them all, and was buried February 9, 1661-2. Shake- 
speare's sister, Joan Hart, left descendants who owned the 
Henley Street House up to the time of its purchase, in 1847, 
by the nation. 

The best books on the life of Shakespeare : J. O. Halliwell- 
Phillipps, Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, tenth edition, 
London, 1898 (the greatest collection of sources and documents) ; 
Sidney Lee, A Life of William Shakespeare (New York, Mac- 
millan, 1909), (the best extended life, especially valuable for its 
study of the biographical value of the sonnets) ; Professor Wal- 
lace's articles referred to in the text. 



CHAPTER II 

ENGLISH DRAMA BEFORE SHAKESPEARE 

The history of the drama includes two periods of 
supreme achievement, that of fifth-century Greece and 
that of Elizabethan England. Between these peaks lies 
a broad valley, the bottom of which is formed by the 
centuries from the fifth to the ninth after Christ. 
Erom its culmination in the tragedies of ^schylus, 
Sophocles, and Euripides, and in the comedies of Aris- 
tophanes, the classic drama declined through the bril- 
liantly realistic comedies of Menander to the coldly 
rhetorical tragedies of the Roman Seneca. The decay 
of culture, the barbarian invasions, and the attacks of 
the Christian Church caused a yet greater decadence, 
a fall so complete that, although the old traditions 
were kept alive for some time at the Byzantine court, 
the drama, as a literary form, had practically disap- 
peared from western Europe before the middle of the 
sixth century. Eor this reason the modern drama is 
commonly regarded as a new birth, as an independent 
creation entirely distinct from the art which had pre- 
ceded it. A new birth and an independent growth 
there certainly was, but it must not be forgotten that 
the love of the dramatic did not disappear with the 
literary drama, that the entertainment of mediaeval 

20 



ENGLISH DRAMA BEFORE SHAKESPEARE 21 

minstrels were not without dramatic elements, that 
dialogues continued to be written if not acted, and 
that the classical drama of Rome, eagerly studied by 
the enthusiasts of the Renaissance, had no slight influ- 
ence upon the course which the modern drama took. 
If we make these qualifications, we may fairly say that 
the old drama died and that a new drama was born. 

The Beginnings of Modern Drama. — When we search 
for the origin of the modern drama, we find it, strangely 
enough, in the very institution which had done so much 
to suppress it as an invention of the devil ; for it made 
its first appearance in the services of the Church. 
From a very early period, the worship of the Church 
had possessed a certain dramatic character. The serv- 
ice of the Mass recalled and represented by symbols, 
which became more and more definite and elaborate, 
the great sacrifice of Christ. And this tendency mani- 
fested itself in other ways, such as the letting fall, on 
Good Friday, of the veil which had concealed the sanctu- 
ary since the first Sunday in Lent, thus recalling the 
veil of the Jewish temple rent in twain at the death of 
Christ. But all this was rather the soil in which the 
drama could grow than the beginning itself. The lat- 
ter came in the ninth century, when an addition was 
made to the Mass which was slight in itself, but which 
was to have momentous consequenceso Among the 
words fitted to certain newly introduced melodies were 
those of which the following is a translation: — 

*' Whom seek ye, O Christians, in the sepulcher ? 
Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified, O ye dwellers in Heaven. 
He is not here ; he is risen as he foretold. 
Go and carry the tidings that he is risen from the sepulcher." 



22 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

At first these words were sung responsively by the 
choir, but before the end of the tenth century they were 
put into the mouths of monks or clergy representing 
the Maries and the angel. By this time the dialogue 
had been removed to the first services of Easter morn- 
ing, and had been connected with the ceremonies of the 
Easter sepulcher. In many churches it was then 
customary on Good Friday to carry a crucifix to a 
representation of a sepulcher which had previously 
been prepared somewhere in the church, whence the 
crucifix was secretly removed before Easter morning. 
Then, at the first Easter service, the empty sepulcher 
was solemnly visited, and this dialogue was sung.^ 
The participants wore ecclesiastical vestments, and the 
acting was of the simplest character, but the amount of 
dialogue increased as time went on, and new bits of 
action were added ; so that before the end of the twelfth 
century some churches presented what may fairly be 
called a short one-act play. Meanwhile, around the 
services of Good Friday and the Christmas season, 
other dramatic ceremonies and short dialogues had 
been growing up, which gave rise to tiny plays dealing 
with the birth of Christ, the visits of the shepherds and 
the Wise Men, and the Old Testament prophecies of 

1 An extract from the Concordia Regularis, a tenth-century ap- 
pendix to the monastic " rule " of St. Benedict, describes this cere- 
mony. "While the third respond is chanted, let the remaining 
three follow [one of the brethren, vested in an alb, had before this 
quietly taken his place at the sepulcher], and let them all, vested 
in copes, and bearing in their hands thuribles with incense, and 
stepping delicately, as those who seek something, approach the 
sepulcher. These things are done in imitation of the angel sitting 
in the monument, and the women with spices coming to anoint the 
body of Jesus." 



ENGLISH DRAMA BEFORE SHAKESPEARE 23 

Christ's coining. Although the elaboration of indi- 
vidual plays continued, the evolution of the drama as 
part of the Church's liturgy was practically complete 
by the middle of the thirteenth century. 

The Earlier Miracle Plays. — The next hundred years 
brought a number of important changes : the gradual 
substitution of English for Latin, the removal from 
the church to the churchyard or market-place, and the 
welding together of the single plays into great groups 
or cycles. The removal from the church was made 
possible by the growth of the plays in length and dra- 
matic interest, which rendered them independent of 
the rest of the service ; and it was made inevitable by 
the enormous popularity of the plays and by the more 
elaborate staging which the developed plays required. 
The formation of more or less unified cycles was the 
result of a natural tendency to supply the missing 
links between the plays already in existence, and to 
write new plays describing the events which led up to 
those already treated. Just as Wagner in our day 
after writing his drama on The Death of Siegfried 
felt himself compelled to write other plays dealing 
with his hero's birth and the events which led to this 
birth, so the unknown authors of the great English 
cycles were led to write play after play until they had 
covered the significant events of Biblical history from 
the creation of the world to the Last Judgment. This 
joining together of isolated plays necessitated taking 
them away from the particular festivals with which 
they had originally been connected and presenting 
them all together on a single day, or, in the case of 
the longer cycles, on successive days. After 1264, 



24 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

■when the festival of Corpus Christi was established 
in honor of the sacrament of Holy Communion, this 
day was the favorite time of presentation. Coming as 
it did in early summer on the Thursday after Trinity 
Sunday, it was well suited for out-of-door performances, 
besides being a festival which the Church especially 
delighted to honor. 

The Great English Cycles. — Of the great cycles of 
miracle plays, only four have come down to us : those 
given at York and at Chester, that in the Towneley 
collection (probably given at or near Wakefield), and 
the cycle called the Ludus Coventrise or Hegge plays, 
of which the place of presentation is uncertain. The 
surviving fragments of lost cycles, however, taken to- 
gether with the records of performances, show that 
religious plays were given with more or less regularity 
in at least one hundred and twenty-five places in Eng- 
land. The cycle which has been most completely 
preserved is that of York, forty-eight plays of which 
still exist. It originally included fifty-seven plays, 
while the number of Biblical incidents known to have 
been treated in plays belonging to one cycle or another 
includes twenty-one based on the Old Testament or on 
legends, and sixty-eight based on the New Testament. 

Even while the religious plays were still a part of 
the Church services, they contained humorous elements, 
such as the realistically comic figure of the merchant 
who sold spices and ointment to the Maries on their 
way to the tomb of Christ. In the later plays these 
interpolations developed into scenes of roaring farce. 
When Herod learned of the escape of the Wise Men, 
he would rage violently about the stage and even among 



ENGLISH DRAMA BEFORE SHAKESPEARE 25 

the spectators. Noah's wife, in the Chester play of 
The Deluge, refuses point-blank to go into the Ark, and 
has to be put in by main force. The Second Shepherds' 
Play of the Towneley cycle contains an episode of 
sheep stealing which is a complete and perfect little 
farce. Nor were the scenes of pathos less effective. 
The scene in the Brome play of Abraham and Isaac 
where the little lad pleads for his life has not lost its 
pathetic appeal with the passage of centuries. While 
many of the miracle plays seem to us stiff and perfunc- 
tory, the best of them possess literary merit of a very 
high order. 

As the development of the plays called for an in- 
creasing number of actors, the clergy had to call upon 
the laity for help, so that the acting fell more and 
more into the hands of the latter, until finally the 
whole work of presenting the plays was taken over, 
in most cases, by the guilds, organizations of the va- 
rious trades which corresponded roughly to our modern 
trades unions. Each guild had its own play of which 
it bore the expense and for which it furnished the 
actors. Thus the shipwrights would present The 
Building of the Ark, the goldsmiths. The Adoration of 
the Wise Men. Sometimes the plays would be presented 
on a number of tiny stages or scaffolds grouped in a 
rectangle or a circle ; more often they were acted on 
floats, called pageants, which were dragged through the 
streets and stopped for performances at several of the 
larger squares. These pageants were usually of two 
stories, the lower used for a dressing-room, the upper 
for a stage. The localities represented were indicated 
in various ways — Heaven, for instance, by a beautiful 



26 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

pavilion ; Hell, by the mouth of a huge dragon. The 
costumes of the actors were often elaborate and costly, 
and there was some attempt at imitating reality, such 
as putting the devils into costumes of yellow and 
black, which typified the flames and darkness of Hell. 

Fairly complete cycles were in existence as early as 
1300 ; they reached the height of their perfection and 
popularity in the later fourteenth and in the fifteeeth 
centuries ; and they began to decline in the sixteenth 
century. After 1550 the performances became more 
and more irregular, until, at the accession of King 
James I, they had practically ceased. 

The Moralities. — Of somewhat later origin than the 
miracle plays, but existing contemporaneously with 
them, were the moralities. In a twelfth-century mira- 
cle play characters had been introduced which were 
not the figures of Biblical story, but personified ab- 
stractions, such as Hypocrisy, Heresy, Pity. By the 
end of the fourteenth century there had come into ex- 
istence plays of which all the characters were of this 
type. These, however, were probably not direct de- 
scendants of the miracles ; but rather the application 
of the newly learned dramatic methods to another sort 
of subject matter, the allegory, a literary type much used 
by poets and preachers of the time. Such plays were 
called ^ moral plays' or 'moralities.' Unlike the mir- 
racle plays, these remained independent of each other, 
and showed no tendency to grow together into cycles. 
The most beautiful of them, written at the end of the 
fifteenth or the beginning of the sixteenth century, is 
that called Tlie Summoning of Everyman. It repre- 
sents a typical man compelled to enter upon the long, 



ENGLISH DRAMA BEFORE SHAKESPEARE 27 

inevitable journey of death. Kindred and Wealth 
abandon him, but long-neglected Good-deeds, revived 
by Knowledge, comes to his aid. At the edge of the 
grave Everyman is deserted by Beauty, Strength, and 
the Five Senses, while Good-deeds alone goes with him 
to the end. Moralities of this type aimed at the cultiva- 
tion of virtue in the spectators, just as the miracle plays 
had aimed at the strengthening of their faith. Another 
type of morality dealt with controversial questions. 
In one of these. King Johan, written about 1538, 
historical personages are put side by side with the 
allegorical abstractions, thus foreshadowing the later 
historical plays, such as Shakespeare's King John. 
Another comparatively late type of morality sought 
to teach an ethical lesson by showing the effect of 
vice and virtue upon the lives of men and women. 
Nice Wanton (c. 1550), for instance, represents the 
consequence of good and evil living, not only by the 
use of such allegorical characters as Iniquity and 
Worldly Shame, but also by means of the human 
beings, Barnabas and Ishmael and their sister Dalila. 
Thus, although the more abstract moralities persisted 
until late in the sixteenth century, these other types at 
the same time helped lead the way to the drama which 
depicts actual life. 

The Interlude. — Both miracle play and morality 
were written with a definite purpose, the teaching of a 
lesson, religious, moral, or political ; the interlude, on 
the other hand, was a short play intended simply to 
interest or to amuse. The original meaning of the 
word " interlude " is a matter of controversy. It may 
have meant a short play introduced between other 



28 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

things, such as the courses of a banquet, or it may 
have meant simply a dialogue. Be that as it may, 
the interlude seems to have had its origin in the 
dramatic character of minstrel entertainments and 
in the dramatic character of popular games, such 
as those, especially beloved of our English ancestors, 
which celebrated the memory of Robin Hood and 
his fellow-outlaws of Sherwood forest. The miracle 
plays set the example of dramatic composition, an ex- 
ample soon followed in the interlude, which put into 
dramatic forms that became more and more elaborate 
popular stories and episodes, both serious and comic. 
Although there had been comic episodes in miracle 
plays and moralities, it was as interludes that the 
amusing skit and the tiny farce achieved an independ- 
ent existence. The first real interlude which has come 
down to us is that called De Clerico et Puella, Of the Cleric 
and the Maiden, which was written not later than the 
early fourteenth century. This is little more than a 
dialogue depicting the attempted seduction of a maiden 
by a wanton cleric. The only other surviving four- 
teenth-century interlude, that of Dux Moraud, is, on 
the other hand, the dramatization of a tragic tale of 
incest and murder. This is, however, somewhat ex- 
ceptional, and may perhaps be regarded as belong- 
ing rather to a type of miracle play not common in 
England, in which the intervention of some heavenly 
power affects the lives of men. At any rate, it is 
probable that the interlude was not often so serious 
an affair, and it developed rapidly in a way that gave 
us, in the sixteenth century, the interludes of John 
Heywood (1497-1577), which are really short farces. 



ENGLISH DRAMA BEFORE SHAKESPEARE 29 

and no bad ones at that. By reason of its charactei 
and the small number of actors which it required, the 
interlude was usually given by professional enter- 
tainers, who were either kept by persons of high rank, 
or traveled from town to town. We find, therefore, 
in the acting of interludes the conditions which gave 
rise to modern comedy and to the modern traveling 
company. 

Classical Influences. — In the preceding paragraphs 
we have considered the early modern drama as an 
independent growth, but the influence of the classical 
drama, particularly the Latin tragedies of Seneca and 
the Latin comedies of Plautus and Terence, showed 
itself in the later moralities and interludes, and was 
to appear again and again in the later course of 
English drama. That great revival of interest in 
classical learning which gave the Renaissance its 
name, was a mighty force in the current of English 
thought throughout the sixteenth century. The old 
Latin tragedies and comedies were revived and were 
produced in the original and in translation at schools 
and colleges. It was an easy step from this to the 
writing of English comedies after Latin models. The 
earliest of such attempts which we know is the 
comedy of Ralph Roister Doister, written by Nicholas 
Udall for Eton boys at some time between 1534 and 
1541. This, commonly called the first English comedy, 
is little more than a clever adaptation of Plautus to 
English manners and customs ; but a comedy written 
soon after. Gammer Gurton's Needle, is really an Inter- 
lude cast in the Plautean mold. The first English 
tragedy, Gorboduc, closely imitative of Seneca, but on 



30 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

a mythical British subject and written in English 
blank verse, did not appear until 1562, nearly a quar- 
ter of a century later. Seneca's tragedies had little 
action, slight characterization, and many extremely 
long speeches, which often display, however, much 
brilliant rhetoric. Gorhoduc has all these qualities 
except the brilliance. The history, the third of the 
types into which the editors of the First Folio were 
to divide Shakespeare's plays, was also affected by 
Senecan influence. We have already seen how the 
historical figure of King John appeared in a morality, 
one which shows little trace of classical tradition; 
and the history, with its general formlessness and its 
mixture of the comic with the serious, remained a 
peculiarly English product. Nevertheless, in the 
second half of the sixteenth century, subjects from 
English history were treated after the manner of 
Latin tragedy, and the long, rhetorical speeches of 
the later historical plays are more suggestive of Seneca 
than are most Elizabethan tragedies. 

The classical type of drama, with its strict obser- 
vance of the three unities,^ was not congenial to the 

1 The three unities of action, place, and time are usually be- 
lieved to have been formulated by Aristotle, who is supposed to 
have said that a tragedy should have but a single plot and that the 
action should be confined to a single day and a single place. As a 
matter of fact, Aristotle is responsible for only the first of these, 
and this he presented as an observation on the actual condition 
which prevailed in Greek tragedy rather than as a dramatic prin- 
ciple for all time. The other principles, which were later deduced 
from the general practice of the Greeks, — a practice arising from 
the manner in which their plays were staged, — were, together 
with the first, elevated by the Romans to the dignity of fixed 
dramatic laws. 



ENGLISH DRAMA BEFORE SHAKESPEARE 31 

English temperament. Its fetters were soon thrown 
off, and, with the notable exception of Ben Jonson 
(1573-1637), few Elizabethan playwrights conformed 
to its rules. Its influence, however, was not confined 
to its imitators. From the classical drama the Eliza- 
bethans gained a sense for form and for the value of 
dramatic technique, which did much to make the 
Elizabethan drama what it was. 

Three Predecessors of Shakespeare. — The develop- 
ment of the English drama from the first attempts at 
comedy, tragedy, and history was extremely rapid. 
When Shakespeare came to London, he found there 
dramatists who were far on the road toward mastery 
of dramatic form, and who were putting into that 
form both great poetry and a profound knowledge of 
human nature. A complete list of these dramatists 
would include a number of names which have a 
permanent place in the history of English literature, 
such as those of Thomas Lodge, Thomas Nash, George 
Peele, and Robert Greene. Among these names three 
deserve especial prominence, not only because of the 
great achievements of these men, but because of their 
influence on Shakespeare. These men were Marlowe, 
Kyd, and Lyly. 

It was Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) who first 
gave to English blank verse those qualities which 
make it an extraordinarily perfect medium of expres- 
sion. Before him, blank verse had no advantages to 
offer in compensation for the abandonment of rime. 
It was stiff, monotonous, and cold. Marlowe began 
to vary the position of the pauses within the line, and 
to do away with the pause at the end of some lines by 



32 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

placing the breaks in thought elsewhere. Thus he 
gave to his verse ease, flexibility, and movement, and 
he put into it the warmth and vividness of his own 
personality. Upon such verse as this Shakespeare 
could hardly improve. But this by no means sums 
up his debt to Marlowe. His characterization of 
Richard III, for instance, was distinctly affected by 
that of Marlowe's hero Tamburlaine, a character to 
which the poet had given a passionate life and an 
energy that made him more than human. In other 
ways less easy to define, Shakespeare must have been 
stimulated by Marlowe's fire. The latter's greatest 
tragedies, Taynhuiiaine, Dr. Faiistus, and Edward II, 
contain poetry so beautiful, feeling so intense, and 
a promise of future achievement so remarkable, that 
his early death may fairly be said to have deprived 
English literature of a genius worthy of comparison 
with that of Shakespeare himself. 

Although Thomas Kyd (1558-1594) was far from the 
equal of Marlowe, he was a playwright of real ability 
and one whose tragedies were unusually popular. 
Influenced greatly by Seneca, he brought to its climax 
the 'tragedy of blood' — a type of drama in which 
ungovernable passions of lust and revenge lead to 
atrocious crimes and end in gruesome and appalling 
murders. His famous Spanish Tragedy was the fore- 
runner of many similar plays, of which Titus Androni- 
cus was one. He probably wrote the original play of 
Hamlet, which was elevated by Shakespeare out of 
its atmosphere of blood and horror into the highest 
realms of thought and poetry. 

John Lyly (c. 1554-1606) was a master in an en- 



ENGLISH DRAMA BEFORE SHAKESPEARE 33 

tirely different field, that of highly artificial comedy. 
He brought court comedy to a hitherto unattained 
perfection of form and style, and in his best work, 
Endymion, he displayed a lovely delicacy of thought 
and expression which has kept his reputation secure. 
He is best known, however, for his prose romance, 
Euphues, which gave its name to the style of which 
it was the climax. Euphuism is a manner of writing 
marked by elaborate antithesis and alliteration, and 
ornamented by fantastic similes drawn from a mass 
of legendary lore concerning plants and animals.^ 
This style, which nowadays seems labored and in- 
artistic, was excessively admired by the Elizabethans. 
Shakespeare imitated it to some extent in Love's 
Labour^s Lost, and parodied it in Falstaff's speech to 
Prince Hal, I Henry IV, II, iv. Several of Shake- 
speare's earlier comedies show Lyly's influence for 
good and ill — ill, in that it made for artificiality and 
strained conceits ; good, in that it made for perfection 
of dramatic form and refinement of expression. 

The Masque. — Somewhat apart from the main current of 
dramatic evolution is the development of the masque, which 
became extremely popular in the reign of James I. The English 
masque was an entertainment, dramatic in character, made up 
of songs, dialogue, and dances. It originated in masked balls 
given by the nobility or at court. To John Lydgate, working 
about 1430, is probably due the credit for introducing into such 

1 The following quotation from Euphues (ed. Bond, 1, 289) illus- 
trates this style : " Hee that seeketh ye depth of knowledge is as 
it were in a Laborinth, in which the farther he goeth, the farther 
he is from the end : or like the bird in the limebush which the more 
she striveth to get out, ye faster she sticketh in." With this of. 
Hamlet, III, iii, 69; I Henry IV, 11, iv, 441. 
D 



34 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

disguisings a literary element, while the later course of the 
masque owes much to Italy. In the developed masque there 
were two classes of participants : noble amateurs, who wore 
elaborate costumes and danced either among themselves or with 
the spectators ; and professional entertainers, who spoke and 
sang. The later masques had elaborate scenery and costumes, 
with just as much plot as would serve to string together the 
lyrics and dances. Sometimes an anti-masque of grotesque 
figures was introduced to serve as contrast to the beautiful 
figures of the masque. The masques were produced with the 
utmost lavishness, the most extravagant one of which we know 
costing over £20,000. Some of them, such as those written by 
Ben Jonson, contain charming poetry ; but their chief interest 
to the student of Shakespeare lies in the fact that their great 
popularity caused Shakespeare to introduce short masques into 
some of his plays, notably Henry VIII, The Winter'' s Tale, 
and T/ie Tempest. In similar allegorical dances often given 
between the acts of Italian plays, has been sought the origin 
of the ' dumb-show,' which was occasionally introduced into 
English tragedies, and which appears in the Mouse-Trap given 
in Hamlet. 

The most useful general histories of this period are : F. E. 
Schelling, Elizabethan Drama (Houghton Mifflin, 1908) ; E. K. 
Chambers, The Medioeval Stage (Oxford, 1903) ; and Creize- 
nach, Geschichte des neueren Dramas (Halle, 1893-1909, and 
not yet complete). Some of the best Miracles, Moralities, and 
Interludes are easily accessible in Everyman with other Inter- 
ludes (Everyman's Library) and J. M. Manly's Specimens 
of the Pre- Shakespearean Drama (Ginn & Co., 1897). 



CHAPTER III 

THE ELIZABETHAN THEATER 

In 1575 London had no theaters ; that is, no build- 
ing especially designed for the acting of plays. By 
1600 there were at least six, among which were some 
so large and beautiful as to arouse the unqualified ad- 
miration of travelers from the continent. It is the pur- 
pose of this chapter to give in outline the history of 
this rapid development of a new type of building ; to 
describe, as accurately as may be, the general features 
of these theaters ; and to indicate the influence which 
these features exerted upon the Shakespearean drama. 
But before doing this it is necessary to point out the 
causes which made the first Elizabethan theater what 
it was. 

The Predecessors of the Elizabethan Theater.^ — Of 
these, the most important was the innyard. As soon as 
the acting of plays ceased to be merely a local affair, as 
soon as there were companies of actors which traveled 
from town to town, it became necessary to find some 
place for the public presentation of plays other than 
the pageants of the guilds or the temporary scaffolds 
sometimes erected for miracle plays. Such a place was 
offered by the courtyard of an inn. The larger inns of 

1 Another predecessor, the great hall of a noble or a university, 
\s mentioned in the section on the private theaters. 

35 



36 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

this period were, for the most part, built in the form 
of a quadrangle surrounding an open court. Opening 
directly off this court were the stables, the kitchen, 
and other offices of the inn ; above these were from one 
to three stories of bedrooms and sitting rooms, entered 
from galleries running all round the court. When 
such a courtyard was used for theatrical performances, 
the actors erected a platform at one end to serve as a 
stage ; the space back of this, shut off by a curtain, 
they used as a dressing-room ; and the part of the 
gallery immediately over it they employed as a second 
stage which could represent the walls of a city or the 
balcony of a house. In the courtyard the poorer class 
of spectators stood ; in the galleries the more wealthy 
sat at their ease. These conditions made the innyards 
much better places for play acting than were the 
city squares, while they were given still another advan- 
tage from the actors' point of view by the fact that 
the easily controlled entrance gave an opportunity for 
charging a regular admission fee — a fee which varied 
with the desirability of the various parts of the house. 
Thus the innyards made no bad playhouses, and they 
continued to be used as such even after theaters were 
built. 

They had, however, one obvious disadvantage ; their 
long, narrow shape made a large number of the seats 
and a large proportion of the spaces available for 
standing room distinctly bad places from which to see 
what was happening on the stage. To remedy this 
defect, the builders of the theaters took a suggestion 
from the bull-baiting and bear-baiting rings. These 
rings, of which a considerable number already existed 



THE ELIZABETHAN THEATER 31 

in the outskirts of London, had been built for fights 
between dogs and bulls or bears, sports vastly enjoyed 
by the Elizabethans. The rings, like the innyards, had 
galleries in which spectators could sit and an open 
yard in which they could stand, and they possessed the 
added merit of being round. Very possibly these rings, 
like the Cornish rings used for miracle plays, originated 
in the stone amphitheaters built by the Romans during 
their occupation of Britain, buildings occasionally used, 
even in the sixteenth century, for the performance of 
plays. It is hardly necessary, nevertheless, to look 
farther than the bear ring to find the cause which 
determined the shape of the Elizabethan public theater. 
The History of the Public Theaters. — With such models, 
then, James Burbage — the father of Richard Burbage, 
later the great actor manager of Shakespeare's company 
— built the first London theater in 1576. It was erected 
not far outside the northern walls of the city, and was 
called simply the Theater. Not far away, a second 
theater, the Curtain, was soon put up, so called not 
from any curtain on the stage, but from the name of 
the estate on which it was built. The next theater, 
the Rose, was situated in another quarter, on the 
Surrey side of the Thames, where the bear-baiting 
rings were. This was constructed, probably in 1587, 
by Philip Henslowe, a prominent theatrical manager. 
Some time after 1594, a second theater, the Swan, was 
put up in this same region, commonly called the Bank- 
side. The suitability of the Bankside as a location for 
theaters is still further attested by the removal thither 
of the Theater in the winter of 1598-1599. The owner 
of the land on which the Theater had originally been 



38 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

built had merely leased it to Burbage — who had since 
died, — and, when the lease expired, he attempted to 
raise the rent, probably believing that the Burbage 
heirs were receiving large profits from the building. 
Being unwilling to pay this increased rent, the Bur- 
bages took down the building, and reerected it on the 
Bankside, this time calling it the Globe. The last to 
be built of the great public theaters was the Fortune, 
which Henslowe erected in 1600. The situation of the 
Fortune outside Cripplegate, although a considerable 
distance west of the Curtain, was, roughly, that of the 
earlier theaters, the northern suburbs of the city. 

This list does not include all the theaters built or 
altered between 1576 and 1600, nor did such building 
stop at the latter date, — the Globe, for instance, was 
burnt and again rebuilt in 1613, — but the sketch is 
complete enough for our purposes. By the end of 1600 
all the more important public theaters were open, and 
after that date, so far as we know, no important changes 
in construction were made. The next real step — 
which was to do away altogether with this type of 
theater — did not come until after the Restoration. 

The Buildings. — Before describing the buildings 
themselves, it is necessary to make one qualification. 
It is impossible to speak of the ^ Elizabethan theaters ' 
or of the 'Elizabethan stage' as if there were one type to 
which all theaters and stages conformed. The Fortune 
was undoubtedly a great improvement over the Theater, 
the outcome of an evolution which could be traced 
through the other theaters if we had the necessary 
documents. If the various theaters did not differ from 
each other as some of our modern theaters do, they 



THE ELIZABETHAN THEATER 39 

still did differ in important points. For example, while 
the Globe and the Curtain were round, other theaters 
were hexagonal or octagonal, and the Fortune was 
square. Likewise, there were certainly differences in 
size. In spite of these facts, it is, however, still possi- 
ble to describe the theaters, in general terms which 
are sufficiently accurate for our present purpose. 

An Elizabethan theater was a three-story building of 
wooden or half-timber construction. The three stories 
formed three galleries for spectators. The first of 
these was raised a little above the level of the ground, 
while the yard, or ^ pit,' in which the lower class of 
spectators stood, seems to have been somewhat sunken. 
The galleries were supported by oaken columns, often 
handsomely carved and ornamented. They were roofed 
and ceiled, but the yard was open to the weather. 
Although we know that the Fortune was eighty feet 
square outside, and that the yard within was fifty -five 
feet square, we are left in uncertainty about the seat- 
ing capacity. From fifteen hundred to eighteen hun- 
dred is, however, the most convincing estimate. There 
were two boxes, or ^ gentlemen's rooms,' presumably in 
the first balcony on either side of the stage. Besides 
these, there were other, cheaper boxes, and the rest of 
the balcony space was filled with seats. The better 
seats were most comfortably cushioned, and the whole 
theater anything but the bare rude place which people 
often imagine it. Coryat, a widely traveled English- 
man of the period, writes of the theaters which he saw 
in Venice that they were " bare and beggarly in com- 
parison of our stately playhouses in England; neither 
can their actors compare with us for stately apparel, 



40 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

shows, or music." That this was no mere British 
prejudice is shown by the similar statements of 
foreigners traveling in England. 

The most striking difference between Elizabethan 
and modern theaters was in the position of the stage, 
which was not back of a great proscenium frame, but 
was built out as a platform into the middle of the 
yard. At the Fortune, the stage was forty -three feet 
wide, — wider, that is, than most modern stages.^ Jut- 
ting out from the level of the top gallery, and extend- 
ing perhaps ten feet over the stage, was a square struc- 
ture called the ^ hut,' which rose above the level of the 
outside walls. Built out from the bottom of this, a 
roof, or ' shadow,' extended forward over a large part 
of the stage. The front of this ' shadow ' was borne, 
in the better theaters, on two columns. The shadow 
and the hut, taken together, are often referred to 
as the ' heavens.' 

The Stage. — When we turn from these general 
features of the theaters to the stage, we shall find it 
convenient to speak of a front and a rear stage, but 
this does not imply any permanent line of demarcation 
between the two, or that they were not often used to- 
gether as a single field of action. The rear stage is 
simply that part of the stage which could be shut off 
from the spectators by curtains ; the other, that part 
which lay in front of the curtains. In other words, 
the front stage is that portion of the stage which was 
built out into the yard, for the curtains continued the 
line made around the rest of the house by the front 

1 In at least some of the theaters, the stage seems to have nar- 
rowed toward the front. 




TiMON OF Athens, v, 4. Outer Scene. 

Trutnpets sound. Enter Alcibiades with his 

Powers be/ore Athens. 
** A/c. Sound to this Coward, and lascivious 

Towne, Our terrible approach." 
Sounds a parly. The Senators appeare upon 

the Wals. 

Eeproduced from The Shakespearean Stage, by V. E, Albright, through the 
courtes}^ of the publishers, the Columbia University Press. 



THE ELIZABETHAN THEATER 41 

of the galleries. In both front and rear stages were 
traps out of which ghosts or apparitions could rise 
and into which such properties as the caldron in 
Macbeth could sink. From the ' heavens,' actors rep- 
resenting gods or spirits — as Jupiter in Cymheline 
or Ariel in The Tempest — could be lowered by means 
of a mechanical contrivance. 

The arrangement of the rear stage may have differed 
considerably in the various theaters, but the typical 
form may best be described as an alcove in front of 
which curtains could be drawn. This alcove was by 
no means so small as the word may seem to imply, 
but must have been about half as wide as the front 
stage and perhaps a quarter as deep. In its rear wall 
was a door through which the actors could enter with- 
out being seen when the curtains were drawn, and it 
seems to have had side doors as well. To the right 
and left of it were doors for such entrances to the 
front stage as could not properly be made through the 
curtains. This part of the stage was used for such 
scenes as the caves in Cymheline or The Tempest^ for 
the tomb in Romeo and Juliet, and for scenes in which 
characters concealed themselves behind the arras, as 
in I Henry IV or Hamlet. Since the front stage 
could not be concealed from the spectators, most heavy 
properties were placed on the back stage, so that this 
part of the stage was generally used for scenes which 
required such properties. For many of these scenes, 
however, both parts of the stage were used, the actors 
spreading out over the front stage soon after the be- 
ginning of the scene. 

The space between the top of the back stage and the 



42 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

heavens formed a balcony, like the balcony already 
described as part of the stage as arranged in the inn- 
yards. This balcony could also be curtained off when 
occasion required. To the right and left of it, over 
the doors leading to the front stage, some of the theaters 
had window-like openings, which were probably not in 
line with the balcony, but, like the doors below them, 
projected at an oblique angle. At one of these windows 
Jessica appeared in the second act of The Merchant 
of Venice; from the balcony Romeo took leave of 
Juliet. Thus the Elizabethan dramatist had three 
fields of action — a front, rear, and upper stage — 
which he could use singly, together, or in various 
combinations. 

Settings and Costumes. — In order to understand the 
way in which this stage was utilized, the student must 
dismiss from his mind two widespread errors. The 
Elizabethan stage was by no means a bare, unfurnished 
platform, nor did the managers substitute for a setting 
placards reading "This is a Forest," or "This is a 
Bedroom." The difference between that age and this 
is not one between no settings and good ones ; it is 
even possible to doubt whether Shakespeare's plays 
were not put on more effectively then than in most of 
our modern theaters. The difference is one of principle, 
and even this difference may easily be exaggerated. 
When we say that Elizabethan stagings were ' symbolic,' 
whereas ours are pictci'ial, we mean that on the former 
the presence of a fe^ selected objects suggested to the 
mind of the spectator all the others which go to make 
up the kind of scene presented. When a few trees 
were placed upon the stage, the audience supplied in 



THE ELIZABETHAN THEATER 43 

imagination the other objects that belong in a forest ; 
when a throne was there, they saw with the mind's 
eye a room of state in a palace. But our modern stage 
also demands the help of the imagination. It is very far 
from presenting a completely realistic picture. We see 
three sides of a room and accept the room as complete, 
although none of us live in rooms which lack a side. 
We see a great cathedral painted on a back drop, and 
are hardly disturbed by the fact that an actor standing 
near it is twice as high as one of the doors. The 
difference between the two stages really simmers 
down to this : our symbols are of painted canvas, the 
Elizabethans' were of another sort. It is extremely 
unlikely that the Elizabethans used painted scenes in 
their public theaters. If they ever did, such ^painted 
cloths' were of the simplest sort, and not pictures 
painted in perspective. Instead, they relied for their 
effects upon solid properties — sometimes quite elaborate 
ones — such as trees, tombs, wells, beds, thrones, etc. 
These, as has been said, were usually set on the rear 
stage, although some of them, such as couches and 
banquet tables, were occasionally brought forward 
during the course of a scene. 

There were, however, scenes which were acted with- 
out any setting. The Elizabethans did not feel it 
necessary to have every scene definitely localized. 
Consequently, many scenes which are described in our 
modern editions of Shakespeare as ^ A Street,' ^ A Place 
before the Castle,' etc., were not definitely assigned to 
any place, and were usually acted without settings on 
the front stage before the closed curtains. In order 
that no time should be lost while properties were 



44 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

being changed, such, scenes were commonly inserted 
between scenes requiring properties, so that a certain 
alternation between set and unset scenes resulted. 
The fourth act of the Merchant of Venice, for example, 
begins with the court-room scene, which demanded the 
whole stage, the properties for the court-room being set 
on the back stage, with perhaps some moved toward 
the front. The fifth act takes place in Portia's garden, 
which also took up the whole stage, with garden prop- 
erties set on the rear stage. Between these two scenes 
comes the one in the street, which was acted before the 
closed curtains and required no properties. The ar- 
rangement is somewhat like that followed in many- 
modern melodramas, where a scene not requiring prop- 
erties is acted in front of a drop scene while scenery is 
being set behind. The raising of the drop — which 
corresponds to the opening of the Elizabethan curtains 
— not only reveals the setting behind, but also makes 
the whole stage, including that part which was in front 
of the drop, the scene of the action which follows.^ 

The costumes on Shakespeare's stage were very 
elaborate, but there was no desire to make them char- 
acteristic of any historical period. Indeed, the striv- 
ing after historical accuracy of costume is so much a 
modern notion that it was nearly two centuries later 
when Macbeth and Julius Csesar began to appear in 
costumes appropriate to their respective periods. On 
the other hand, there probably was some attempt to 
distinguish the dress of different nationalities. Some 
notion of how elaborate the costumes of Elizabethan 
actors were is given by the fact that Henslowe's 

1 With this whole paragraph, cf . Albright, pp. 81ff,, and 104-105. 




TiMON OF Athens, v, 3. I^fNER Scene. 

Enter a Souiiiier in the IVoot/s, see/~-i»g Ttnion. 
^' Sol. — Timon is dead, who hath out-stietchc his 
span, 
Some Heast reade this ; There do's not 

live a Man. 
Dead sure, and this his Grave, what 's on 
this Tomb," 

Reproduced from The Shakespearean Stage, by V. E. Albright, through the 
courtesy of the publishers, the Columbia University Press. 



THE ELIZABETHAN THEATER 45 

diary ^ has an entry of £4 14s. paid for a pair of hose, 
and £20 for a cloak. In connection with this it must 
be remembered that money was worth then about eight 
times what it is now, and that a playwright of the 
time rarely received more than £8 for a play. Another 
indication is given in Heuslowe's list of the costumes 
belonging to the Lord Admiral's men, which included 
some eighty-seven garments, for the most part of silk 
or satin, ornamented with fringe and gold lace. 

The Private Theater. — In the preceding sections 
the type of theater described has been referred to as 
' public' This has been done to distinguish it from the 
'private ' theater, a type which, although similar in so 
far as the general principles of staging employed are 
concerned, differed from the public theater in impor- 
tant particulars. The private theater is so called be- 
cause it originated in the performances given before 
the invited guests of royalty, the nobility, or the uni- 
versities. Since these performances were given in 
great halls, the type of theater which resulted was 
completely roofed, was lighted by candles, and had 
seats in the pit as well as in the galleries — when there 
were galleries. As soon as such theaters were built, 
admission was, of course, no longer by invitation, but 
the prices were so much higher than those of the pub- 
lic theaters that the audiences remained much more 
select. The first of these theaters was the Blackf riars, 
the remodeled hall of the former monastery of the 
Blackfriars, done over by Burbage in 1596. Others 

1 This memorandum book of Philip Henslowe, the great man- 
ager, is one of our chief sources of information about the Eliza- 
bethan theater. ^ 



46 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

were those in which the ^ Children of Paul's ' acted, the 
Cockpit, and the Salisbury Court. The Blackfriars 
was at first under royal patronage, the actors being 
the ' Children of the Chapel Royal.' These choir boys 
were carefully trained in acting and dancing as well as 
singing, and were subsidized by royalty, so that their 
performances tended to be much more spectacular than 
those of the public theaters. The performances at the 
Blackfriars seem to have retained this characteristic 
even after 1608, when Shakespeare's company took 
over the theater. Probably because of the patronage 
and interest of royalty, it was in the private theaters 
that painted scenes, already used in court masques, 
were first introduced. Thus these roofed theaters are 
really the forerunners, so far as England is concerned, 
of our modern playhouses. 

Effect of Stage Conditions on the Drama. — When 
studied in the light of Elizabethan stage conditions, 
many characteristics of the plays written by Shake- 
speare and his contemporaries cease to be surprising 
or puzzling. A complete conception of all the effects 
which these conditions had upon the drama can only 
be gained by a careful study of all the plays. Here, 
moreover, we are obliged to pass over many points of 
more general character, such as the impossibility of 
representing night by darkness when the performances 
were given by daylight in a theater open to the sun. 
Two or three are, however, especially important. For 
instance, since it was possible to leave many scenes 
indefinitely localized, and since there was no necessity 
of long pauses for the change of heavy scenery, the 
dramatists were not limited as ours are to a compara- 



THE ELIZABETHAN THEATER 47 

tively small number of scenes. This was an advantage 
in that it gave great freedom and variety to the action ; 
but it was also a disadvantage in that it led to a scat- 
tering of effect and to looseness of construction. So 
in Antony and Cleopatra there are forty-two scenes, 
some of which are only a few lines long, and in conse- 
quence the play loses the intense, unified effect which it 
might otherwise have produced. Again, the absence of 
a front curtain made it impossible to end an act or play 
with a grand climax or an impressive tableau. Instead, 
the scenes gradually die away; the actors leave the 
stage one by one, or go off in procession. Whether this 
was gain or loss is a debatable question. At any rate, 
this caused the Elizabethan plays to leave on the 
spectator an impression totally different from that left 
by ours. Finally, the absence of pictorial scenery 
forced the dramatists to use verbal description far 
more than is customary to-day. To this fact we owe 
some passages of poetry which are among the most 
beautiful in all dramatic literature. 

Theatrical Companies. — During Shakespeare's life- 
time there were in existence more or less continuously 
some twenty theatrical companies, at least four or five 
of which, during the greater part of this period, 
played contemporaneously in London. We have 
already seen how great nobles, before the end of the 
fifteenth century, maintained small companies of men 
as players of Interludes. When not wanted by their 
patrons, these men traveled about the country, and 
their example was followed by other groups whose 
legal position was a much less certain quantity. As a 
result, a law was passed in 1572 which required that 



48 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

all companies of actors should be under the definite 
protection of some noble. As time went on, this re- 
lation became one of merely nominal patronage, but 
the companies continued to be known by the name of 
their patron. Thus the company to which Shake- 
speare belonged was known successively as Lord 
Strange's, the Earl of Derby's, first and second Lord 
Hunsdon's (or, because of the office which the Huns- 
dons held, as the Lord Chamberlain's), and as the 
King's company. At various times it appeared at 
the Theater, the Curtain, the Globe, and the Black- 
friars, its greatest triumphs being associated with the 
Globe. By 1608, if not before, it was unquestionably 
the most successful company in London. It had the 
patronage of King James, and it controlled and acted 
in what were respectively the most popular public 
and private theaters, the Globe and the Blackfriars. 
When not acting in London, it made tours to other 
cities. Its number included several actors of well- 
known ability, among them Richard Burbage, the 
greatest tragic actor of the time. 

The most formidable rivals to this company were 
the Admiral's men and the children's companies. The 
former company was managed by Richard Henslowe ; 
had, after 1600, a permanent home in the Fortune 
theater ; and included among its number Edward 
Alleyn, next to Burbage the most famous Elizabethan 
actor. The two great children's companies were those 
made up of the choir boys of the Chapel Royal and of 
St. Paul's. The former had begun to give dramatic per- 
formances as early as 1506. They were well trained, 
had the advantage of royal patronage, and were ex- 



THE ELIZABETHAN THEATER 49 

traordinarily popular, becoming very serious rivals of the 
men's companies. The performances of the Children 
of the Chapel Royal at the Blackfriars between 1596 
and 1608 were the most fashionable in London. The 
children's companies were finally suppressed about 1609. 

The members of the men's companies were divided 
into four classes : those who had shares in the house 
and in the company, those who had shares only in the 
company, hired actors, and apprentices. The third of 
these classes received a fixed salary, the last were 
cared for by the individual actors to whom they 
were apprenticed. The profits of the theaters were 
derived from entrance money and the additional fees 
received for the better seats. All of the first and 
half of the second was divided between the members 
of the first and second classes of shareholders. The 
members of the first received in addition shares in the 
other half of the additional fees.^ 

Because female parts were always taken by men or 
boys, it is sometimes assumed that Elizabethan acting 
must have been crude. On the contrary, we have every 
reason to believe that most parts, particularly the less 
important ones, were acted better than they are usually 
acted to-day. Some of the actors, such as Burbage and 
Alley n, were undoubtedly men of great genius. All 
of them had the advantage of regular and consistent 
training — a thing only too often lacking in these days 
when an actor of ability is almost immediately made 
a *star,' although he frequently knows pitifully little 
of the art of acting. One of the most interesting 
testimonies to the ability of Elizabethan actors is Ben 

1 For Shakespeare's share, of. p. 15. 
E 



50 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

Jon son's tribute to the memory of the boy actor, 
Salathiel Pavy : — 

" Weep with me, all you that read 

This little story ; 
And know, for whom a tear you shed 

Death's self is sorry. 
'Twas a child that so did thrive 

In grace and feature, 
As Heaven and Nature seem'd to strive 

Which owned the creature. 
Years he number' d scarce thirteen 

When Fates turn'd cruel, 
Yet three fill'd zodiacs had he been 

The stage's jewel ; 
And did act (what now we moan) 

Old men so duly, 
As sooth the Parcse thought him one, 

He play'd so truly. 
So, by error, to his fate 

They all consented ; 
But, viewing him since, alas, too late I 

They have repented ; 
And have sought, to give new birth, 

In baths to steep him ; 
But, being so much too good for earth, 

Heaven vows to keep him." 

Many of the points discussed in this chapter are still the 
subject of controversy. The theories of the stage adopted here 
are, in general, those of V. E. Albright, The Shakespearean Stage 
(Macmillan, 1909). Among the numerous books and articles 
on these topics, the most useful are : G. F. Reynolds, Some 
Principles of Elizabethan Staging {Modern Philology, Vols. 3 
and 4) ; Brodmeier, Die Shakespeare Buhne (Weimar, 1904) ; 
Fleay, Chronicle History of the London Stage (London, 1890) ; 
Henslowe^s Diary, ed. by W. Greg (London, 1904) ; and the 
works of Creizenach and Schelling referred to in the pre- 
ceding chapter. 



CHAPTER IV 



ELIZABETHAN LONDON 



Shortly after Shakespeare came to London, England 
demonstrated her new greatness to an astonished world; 
by the defeat of Spain's greatest fleet, the " invincible 
Armada,'' England showed herself as no longer a small 
island nation, but as Mistress of the Sea. In this vic- 
tory culminated the growth which had begun under 
Henry VII, first of Tudor sovereigns. Naval supremacy 
was, however, but a sign of a much greater and more 
far-reaching transformation — a transformation which 
had affected science, literature, and religion, and one 
which filled the men of Shakespeare's time with such 
enthusiasm for the past, such confidence in the present, 
and such hope for the future, as has hardly been paral- 
leled in the world's history. 

During the century which had elapsed since 1485, 
Copernicus' s discovery that the sun and not the earth 
was the center of our universe, had revolutionized the 
map of the heavens, as Columbus's discovery of America 
had revolutionized the map of the world. Thus stimu- 
lated, scientific investigation started afresh, working 
in accordance with the modern methods formulated by 
Francis Bacon, while voyage quickly followed voyage, 
each new discovery adding fuel to the fire of enthusi- 
asm. Wonderful tales of new lands and unimagined 
wealth spread from mouth to mouth. The voyages 

51 



52 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

of Martin Frobisher, Anthony Hawkins, and Francis 
Drake opened new worlds, not only to English imagina- 
tion, but also to English trade. It was they and men 
like them who gave to England her unexpected naval 
and commercial supremacy. 

The latter was partly a result of the former. Eliza- 
beth's victories over foreign enemies strengthened her 
power at home, and assured that freedom from internal 
discord which is essential to commercial prosperity. 
No sovereign distracted by danger from without could 
have mastered the factions which had sprung up within. 
The great religious movement known as the Protestant 
Reformation had not stopped in England with the 
separation of the English from the Roman Church 
under Henry VIII. It had brought into existence the 
Puritan, austere, bigoted, opposed to beauty of church 
and ceremonial, yet filled with superb moral and reli- 
gious enthusiasm. It had brought about the persecution 
of Catholics and the still more merciless persecution of 
Protestants during the Catholic reaction under Queen 
Mary. Its successes, which began again with Eliza- 
beth's reign, gave occasion for continual intrigues of 
Catholic emissaries. It all but plunged the nation into 
civil war, a war averted only by the victory over Spain 
and by the statesmanship of Elizabeth. Freed from 
the fear of war, however, Puritan and Churchman, each 
in his own way, could apply his enthusiasm to the works 
of peace. 

With the return of peace and security, moreover, 
England first felt the full effect of the literary Renais- 
sance. The revival of classical learning had already 
transformed the art and literature of the continent, 



ELIZABETHAN LONDON 53 

especially that of Italy. When, therefore, England 
turned again to the classics, it turned also to the Italian 
culture and literature to which the Eenaissance had 
given birth, and from these sources English literature 
received new beauty of thought and form. 

It was, then, in a new England that Shakespeare 
lived, an England intensely proud of the past which 
had made the present possible, an England rich enough 
and secure enough to have leisure and interest for litera- 
ture, an England so vigorous, so confident, that it could 
not fail to bring out all that was latent in its greatest 
genius. 

The City of London. — All this enthusiasm and activity 
reached its highest point in London. Even more then 
than now, London was the center of influence, the 
place to which the greatest abilities were irresistibly 
attracted, and in which their greatest work was done. 
But the London of Shakespeare's time was vastly differ- 
ent from the London of to-day. On all sides, except 
that washed by the Thames, the mediaeval walls were 
still standing and served as the city's actual boundary. 
Outside them were several important suburbs, but where 
now houses extend for miles in unbroken ranks, there 
were then open fields and pleasant woods. The total 
population of the city hardly exceeded a hundred 
thousand, while that of the suburbs, including the many 
guests of the numerous inns, amounted to perhaps a 
hundred thousand more. Hence, although there un- 
doubtedly was crowding in the poorer quarters, London 
was a much more open city than it is to-day. The 
great houses all had their gardens, and a few minutes 
walk in any direction brought one to open country. 



54 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

Westminster, now well within the greater London, 
was then only the most important suburb. Here was 
the Hall in which Parliament met, and, not far away, 
Whitehall, the favorite London residence of the Queen. 
Attracted by the presence of royalty, many of the great 
nobles had built their houses in this quarter, so that 
the north bank of the Thames from Westminster to the 
City was lined with stately buildings. 

The Thames was London's pleasantest highway. 
It was then a clear, beautiful river spanned by a single 
bridge. If one wished to go from the City to West- 
minster, or even eastward or westward within the City 
itself, one could go most easily by boat. The Queen in 
her royal barge was often to be seen on the river. The 
great merchant companies had their splendid barges, 
in which they made stately progresses. One went by 
boat to the bear gardens and theaters on the south bank. 
Below the bridge, the river was crowded with shipping. 
At one of the wharves lay an object of universal in- 
terest, the Golden Hind, the ship in which Drake had 
made his famous voyage round the world. 

Within the city, most of the streets were narrow, 
poorly paved, and worse lighted. Those who went 
about by night had their servants carry torches, called 
"links," before them, or hired boys to light them 
home. Such sanitation as existed was wretched, so that 
plagues and other diseases spread rapidly and carried 
off an appalling number of victims. The ignorance and 
inefficiency of the police is rather portrayed than 
satirized in Shakespeare's Dogberry and Verges. Such 
evils were common to all seventeenth-century cities, 
but these cities had their compensations in a freedom 



ELIZABETHAN LONDON 55 

and picturesqueness which have disappeared from our 
modern towns. 

The Citizens. — In Elizabethan London, as in every 
city, the men who represented extremes of wealth and 
poverty, the courtiers and their imitators, the beggars 
and the sharpers, are those of whom we hear most; 
but the greater part of the population, that which con- 
trolled the city government, was of the middle class, 
sober, self-respecting tradespeople, inclined towards 
Puritanism, and jealous of their independence. Such 
people naturally distrusted and disliked the actors and 
their class, and used against them, as far as they could, 
the great authority of the city. In spite of court favor, 
the actors were compelled by city ordinances to build 
their theaters outside the city limits or on ground which 
the city did not control. Several attempts were made 
to suppress play acting altogether, ostensibly because 
of the danger that crowded audiences would spread 
the plague when it became epidemic. In spite of this 
ofl&cial opposition, however, the sober citizens formed 
a goodly part of theater audiences until after the acces- 
sion of King James, when the rising tide of Puritanism 
led to increased austerity. At no time were the maj ority 
of the citizens entirely free from a love for worldly 
pleasures. They swelled the crowds at the taverns, 
and their wives often vied with the great ladies of court 
in extravagance of dress. 

St. Paul's. — The great meeting place of London 
was, oddly enough, the nave of St. Paul's Cathedral. 
This superb Gothic church, later destroyed by the 
Great Fire, was used as a common passageway, as a 
place for doing business and for meeting friends. In 



56 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

the late morning hours, the men-about-town prome- 
naded there, displaying their gorgeous clothes and 
hailing those whom they wished to have known as 
their acquaintances. If a gallant's cash were at low 
ebb, he loitered there, hoping for an invitation to 
dinner. If he had had a dinner, he often came back 
for another stroll in the afternoon. At one pillar he 
would find lawyers standing; at another, serving men 
seeking employment; at still another, public secre- 
taries. Here one could learn anything from the latest 
fashion to the latest political scandal. Meanwhile, 
divine worship might be going on in the chancel, unob- 
served unless some fop wished to make himself con- 
spicuous by joking with the choir boys. Thus St. 
Paul's was a school of life invaluable to the dramatist. 
We know that Ben Jonson learned much there, and we 
can hardly doubt that Shakespeare did likewise. 

The Taverns. — Another center of London life was 
the tavern. The man who would now lunch at his 
club then dined at an ' ordinary,' a table d^hdte in 
some tavern. Men dined at noon, and then sat on 
over their wine, smoking or playing at cards or dice. 
In the evening one could always find there music and 
good compa,ny. One tradition of Shakespeare tells of 
his evenings at the Mermaid tavern. " Many were the 
wit-combates," writes Fuller, "betwixt him [Shake- 
speare] and Ben Jonson, which two I behold like a 
Spanish great gallion, and an English man of War; 
Master Jonson (like the former) was built far higher 
in Learning; Solid, but Slow in his performances. 
Shake-spear, with the English man-of-War, lesser in 
bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, 



ELIZABETHAN LONDON 57 

tack about and take advantage of all winds, by the 
quickness of his Wit and Invention." Francis Beau- 
mont, the dramatist, wrote the following verses to 
Ben Jonson : — 

" What things have we seen 
Done at the Mermaid, heard words that have been 
So nimble, and so full of subtle flame, 
As if everyone from whence they came 
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest, 
And had resolved to live a fool the rest 
Of his dull life ; then when there hath been thrown 
"Wit able enough to justify the town 
For three days past ; wit that might warrant be 
For the whole city to talk foolishly 
Till that were cancelled ; and when that was gone, 
We left an air behind us, which alone 
Was able to make the two next companies 
(Right witty, though but downright fools) more wise." 

At the Theater. — Having dined, the Elizabethan 
gentleman often visited one of the numerous book- 
shops, or else went to the theater, perhaps to the 
Globe. In the latter case, since this theater was on 
the south bank of the Thames, he was most likely to 
cross the river by boat. A flag, floating from a turret 
over the theater, announced a performance there. 
The prices paid for admission varied, but the regular 
price for entrance to the Globe seems to have been a 
penny (about fifteen cents in the money of to-day). 
This, however, gave one only the right to stand in the 
pit or, perhaps, to sit in the top gallery. For a box 
the price was probably a shilling (equivalent to two 
dollars), the poorer seats costing less. At the aristo- 
cratic Blackfriars, sixpence (one dollar) was the low- 



58 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

est price. At this theater, the most fashionable 
occupied seats on the stage, where they were at once 
extremely conspicuous and in the way of the actors ; 
but this custom probably did not spread to the Globe 
before 1603. At the Blackfriars, too, one could have 
a seat in the pit, while at the Globe the pit was filled 
with a standing, jostling crowd of apprentices and 
riffraff. In the theater every one was talking, laugh- 
ing, smoking, buying oranges, nuts, wine, or cheap 
books from shouting venders, just as is done in some 
music halls to-day. Once the trumpet had sounded for 
the third time, indicating the beginning of the per- 
formance, a reasonable degree of quiet was restored, 
until a pause in the action let the uproar burst forth 
anew. At an Elizabethan theater there were no pauses 
for shifting scenes. Consequently the few introduced 
were determined either by convention or by breaks in 
the action. At the Blackfriars and more aristocratic 
theaters, there was music between the acts, but at the 
Globe this was not customary until a comparatively 
late date, if ever. 

An audience like that at the Globe, made up of all 
sorts and conditions of men from the highest nobility 
to the lowest criminal, was, quite naturally, not easy 
to please as a whole. Yet, after all, the Elizabethans 
were less critical in some respects than we are. Al- 
though many comparatively cheap books were pub- 
lished, reading had not then become a habit, and a 
good plot was not the less appreciated because it was 
old. The audiences did, however, demand constant 
variety, so that plays had short runs, and most dram- 
atists were forced to pay more attention to quantity 



ELIZABETHAN LONDON 59 

than to quality of production. The playwrights had, 
nevertheless, one great advantage over ours. Since 
the performances were given in the afternoon, and 
since theaters like the Globe were open to the weather, 
these men wrote for audiences which were fresh and 
wide-awake, ready to receive the best which the dram- 
atist had to give. 

It was under such conditions as these that Shake- 
speare worked. He wrote for all classes of people, 
men bound together, nevertheless, by a common en- 
thusiasm for England's past and a common confidence 
in England's future ; men who were constantly coming 
in contact with persons from all parts of Europe, with 
sailors and travelers who had seen the wonders of the 
New World and the Old; men so stimulated by new 
discoveries, by new achievements of every sort, that 
hardly anything, even the supernatural, seemed for 
them impossible. Outside of ancient Athens, no 
dramatist has had a more favorable environment. 

The best books on this subject for the general reader : Sir 
Walter Besant, London in the Time of the Tudors (London, 

1904) ; H. T. Stephenson, Shakespeare'' s London (Henry Holt, 

1905) ; T. F. Ordish, Shakespeare's London (The Temple 
Shakespeare Manuals, 1897). 



CHAPTER V 

Shakespeare's nondramatic works 

We shall later trace Shakespeare's development as 
a writer of plays. We must first, however, turn back 
to discuss some early productions of his, which were 
composed before most of his dramas, and which are 
wholly distinct from these in character. 

Every young author who mixes with men notices 
what kinds of work other writers are producing, and 
is tempted to try his hand at every kind in turn. 
Later he learns that he is fitted for one particular kind 
of work ; and, leaving other forms of writing to other 
men, devotes the rest of his life to his chosen field. 
So it was with Shakespeare. While a young man, he 
tried several different forms of poetry in imitation of 
contemporary versifiers, and thus produced the poems 
which we are to discuss in this chapter. Later he 
came to realize that his special genius was in the 
field of the drama, and abandoned other types of 
poetry to turn his whole energy toward the production 
of plays. Although unquestionably inferior to the 
author's greatest comedies and tragedies, these early 
poems are, in their kind, masterpieces of literature. 

Venus and Adonis. — The first of these poems, a 
verse narrative of some 1204 lines, called Venus and 
Adonis, was printed in the spring of 1593 when the 

60 



SHAKESPEARE'S NONDRAMATIC WORKS 61 

author was about twenty-nine years old. As far as 
we have evidence, it was the first of all Shakespeare's 
works to appear in print ; ^ but it is possible that some 
early plays were composed before it although printed 
after it. 

Other poets of the day had been interested in retell- 
ing in their own way old stories of Greek and Roman 
literature, and Shakespeare, in Venus and Adonis, was 
engaged in the same task. The outline of the poem is 
taken (either directly or through an imitation of pre- 
vious borrowers) from the Latin poet Ovid,^ who lived 
in the time of Christ. Venus, the goddess of love, is 
enamored of a beautiful boy, called Adonis, and tries 
in vain by every device to win his affection. He re- 
pulses all her advances, and finally runs away to go 
hunting, and is killed by a wild boar. Venus mourns 
over his dead body, and causes a flower (the anemone 
or windflower) to spring from his blood. Shakespeare's 
handling of the story shows both the virtues and 
the defects of a young writer. It is more diffuse, more 
wordy, than his later work, and written for the taste 
of another time than ours ; but, on the other hand, it 
is full of vivid, picturesque language of melodious 
rhythm, and of charming little touches of country life. 

Like most of Shakespeare's verse, it is written in 
iambic pentameter. ^ The poem is divided into stanzas 

1 Shakespeare in his dedication calls it " the first heir of my in- 
vention " ; but opinions differ as to what he meant by this. 

2 Ovid's il/e^amorp/ioses, Book X. 

*That is, the common, or standard, line has ten syllables with an 
accent on every even syllable, as in the following line : — 

1 2 345 67 8 9 10 

The NIGHT of SORrow NOW is TURN'D to DAY. 



62 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

of six lines each, in which the first and third lines 
rime, the second and fourth, and the fifth and sixth. 
We represent this arrangement of rimes by saying 
that the rime scheme of the stanza is a, b, a, b, c, c, 
where the same letter represents the same riming 
sound at the ends of lines. As a specimen stanza, the 
following, often quoted because of the vivid picture 
it presents, is given. It describes a mettlesome horse. 

" Round-hoof d, short-jointed, fetlocks shag and long, (a) 

Round breast, full eye, small head and nostril wide, (6) 

High crest, short ears, straight legs and passing strong, (a) 

Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide : (6) 

Look, what a horse should have he did not lack, (c) 

Save a proud rider on so proud a back." (c) 

The Rape of Lucrece. — A year later, in 1594, when 
Shakespeare was thirty, he published another nar- 
rative poem. The Rape of Lucrece. The story of 
Lucrece had also come down from Ovid.^ This poem 
is about 1800 lines in length. It tells the old legend, 
found at the beginning of all Roman histories, how 
Sextus Tarquin ravished Lucrece, the pure and beauti- 
ful wife of Collatine, one of the Roman nobles ; how 
she killed herself rather than survive her shame ; and 
how her husband and friends swore in revenge to de- 
throne the whole Tarquin family. This poem, as 
compared with Venus and Adonis, shows some traces 
of increasing maturity. The author does more serious 
and concentrated thinking as he writes. Whether or 
not it is a better poem is a question which every man 
must settle for himself. Its best passages are prob- 
ably more impressive, its poorest ones more dull. 

1 From his Fasti. 



SHAKESPEARE'S NONDRAMATIC WORKS 63 

The form of stanza used here is known as " rime 
royal," which had become famous two centuries before 
as a favorite meter of the first great English poet, 
Geoffrey Chaucer. This stanza contains seven lines 
instead of six : the rime-scheme is as follows : a, h, 
a, b, b, c, c. The following is a specimen stanza 
from the poem : — 

"Now stole upon the time the dead of night, («) 

When heavy sleep had closed up mortal eyes. (6) 

No comfortable star did lend his light, (a) 

No noise but owls' and wolves' death-boding cries ; (&) 

Now serves the season that they may surprise (6) 

The silly lambs. Pure thoughts are dead and still, (c) 

While lust and murder wakes to stain and kill." (c) 

A significant fact about both of these poems is that 
they were dedicated to Henry Wriothesley (pronounced 
Wrisley or Rot'-es-ly), Earl of Southampton, who has 
already been mentioned as a friend and patron of 
Shakespeare. The dedication at the beginning of 
Venus and Adonis is conventional and almost timid in 
tone ; that prefixed to the Lucrece seems to indicate a 
closer and more confident friendship which had grown 
up during the intervening year. Dedications to some 
prominent man were frequently prefixed to books by 
Elizabethan authors, either as a mark of love and 
respect to the person addressed, or in hopes that a 
little pecuniary help would result from this acceptable 
form of flattery. In Shakespeare's case it may pos- 
sibly have fulfilled both of these purposes. 

The Sonnets. — Besides these two narrative poems 
Shakespeare wrote numerous sonnets. In order to 



64 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

understand his accomplishment in this form of poetry, 
some account of the type is necessary. 

The sonnet may be briefly defined as a rimed 
poem in iambic pentameter, containing fourteen lines, 
divided into the octave of eight lines and the sextet 
of six. 

The sonnet originated in southern Europe, and 
reached its highest stage of development in the hands 
of the great Italian poet Petrarch, who lived some two 
centuries before Shakespeare. As written by him it 
was characterized by a complicated rime scheme,^ 

1 The rime scheme of the Italian type divided each sonnet into 
two. parts, the first one of eight lines, the second of six. In the 
first eight lines the rimes usually went a, b, b, a, a, b, b, a ; but 
sometimes a, 6, a, b, a, b, a, b : in both cases using only two 
rimes for the eight lines. In the second or six-line part there 
were several different arrangements, of which the following were 
the" most common : (1) c, d, e, c, d, e; (2) c, d, c, d, c, d ; (3) c, d, 
e, d, c, e. All of these rime-schemes alike were intended, by their 
constant repetition and interlocking of the same rimes, to give 
the whole poem an air of exquisite workmanship, like that of a 
finely modeled vase. Here is an English sonnet of Milton's, imi- 
tating the form of Petrarch's and illustrating its rime scheme : — 

" When I consider how my light is spent (a) 

Ere half my days in this dark world and wide, (&) 

And that one talent which is death to hide (6) 

Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent (a) 

To serve therewith my Maker, and present (a) 

My true account, lest He returning chide, (6) 

Doth God exact day-labour, light denied? (6) 

I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent (a) 

That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need (c) 

Either man's work or his own gifts. Who best (d) 

Bear his mild yoke, they serve Him best. His state («) 

Is kingly : thousands at his bidding speed, (c) 

And post o'er land and ocean without rest ; (d) 

They also serve who only stand and wait." («) 



SHAKESPEARE'S NONDRAMATIC WORKS 65 

which gave each one of these short poems an atmos- 
phere of unusual elegance and polish. 

Sonnets were often written in groups on a single 
theme. These were called sonnet sequences. Each 
separate poem was like a single facet of a diamond, 
illuminating the subject from a new point of view. 

In the hands of Petrarch and other great writers of 
his own and later times, the sonnet became one of the 
most popular forms of verse in Europe. Such popu- 
larity for any particular type of literature never 
arises without a reason. The aim of the sonnet is to 
embody one single idea or emotion, one deep thought 
or wave of strong feeling, to concentrate the reader's 
whole mind on this one central idea, and to clinch it 
at the end by some epigrammatic phrase which will 
fasten it firmly in the reader's memory. For instance, 
in Milton's sonnet On his Blindness, the central idea 
is the glory of patience ; and the last line drives this 
main idea home in words so pithily adapted that 
they have become almost proverbial. 

During the sixteenth century, rich young English- 
men were in the habit of traveling in Italy for educa- 
tion and general culture. They brought home with 
them a great deal that they saw in this brilliant and 
highly educated country ; and among other things 
they imported into England the Italian habit of writ- 
ing sonnets. The first men who composed sonnets in 
English after the Italian models were two young 
noblemen, Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey, 
who wrote just before Shakespeare was born. Their 
work called out a crowd of imitators ; and in a few 
years the writing of sonnets became the fashion. 

F 



66 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

As a young man, Shakespeare found himself among 
a crowd of authors, with whom sonnetteering was a 
literary craze ; and it is not surprising that he should 
follow the fashion. Most of these were probably 
composed about 1594, when the poet was thirty years 
old; but in regard to this there is some uncertainty. 
A few were certainly later. They were not printed in 
a complete volume until 1609 ; ^ and then they were 
issued by a piratical publisher, apparently without the 
author's consent. 

In the Shakespearean sonnet the complicated rime 
scheme of its Italian original has become very much 
simplified, being reduced to the following form : a, 6, 
a, 6 ; c, d, c, d\ e, /, e, /; g, g. This is merely three 
four-line stanzas with alternate rimes, plus a final 
couplet. Such a simplified form had already been 
used by other English authors, from whom our poet 
borrowed it. 

Shakespeare's sonnets, apart from some scattered 
ones in his plays, are 154^ in number. They are 
usually divided into two groups or sequences. The 
first sequence consists of numbers 1-126 (according to 
the original edition) ; and most of them are unques- 
tionably addressed to a man. The second sequence 
contains numbers 127-154, and the majority of these 
are clearly written to a woman. There are a few in 
both groups which do not show clearly the sex of the 
person addressed, and also a few which are not ad- 
dressed to any one. 

1 See p. 113. 

2 Including at least three which do not have in all respects the 
regular sonnet form. 



SHAKESPEARE'S NONDRAMATIC WORKS 67 

Beyond some vague guesses, we have no idea as to 
the identity of the " dark lady " who inspired most of 
the last twenty-eight sonnets. Somewhat less uncer- 
tainty surrounds the man to whom the poet speaks in 
the first sequence. A not improbable theory is that 
he was the Earl of Southampton already mentioned, 
although this cannot be considered as proved.^ The 
chief arguments which point to Southampton are: 
(a) That Shakespeare had already dedicated Venus 
and Adonis and Lucrece to him ; (b) that he was re- 
garded at that time as a patron of poets ; (c) that 
the statements about this unnamed friend, his reluc- 
tance to marry, his fair complexion and personal 
beauty, his mixture of virtues and faults, fit South- 
ampton better than any other man of that period 
whom we have any cause to associate with Shake- 
speare; and (d) that he was the only patron of 
Shakespeare's early years known to us, and was 
warmly interested in the poet. 

The literary value of the different sonnets varies con- 
siderably. When an author is writing a fashionable 

1 Southampton's chief rival for this position in the opinion of 
scholars has been William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. One point 
in his favor has been that the initials W. H. (supposed to stand for 
William Herbert) are given as those of the person to whom the 
dedication of the volume was addressed by its publisher. Mr. 
Sidney Lee thinks, however, that this is a dedication by the printer 
to the printer's friend, not by Shakespeare to Shakespeare's friend, — 
a possible, though not wholly convincing, explanation. The First 
Folio was dedicated to Herbert after Shakespeare's death, but we 
have no evidence that the two men were intimate friends while liv- 
ing. Meres mentions the sonnets of Shakespeare in 1598, so part of 
them at least must have been written before that year ; but Her- 
bert did not have a permanent residence in London until 1598, and 
was then only eighteen years old. 



68 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

form of verse, he is apt to become more or less imitaA 
tive and artificial at times, saying things merely be- 
cause it is the vogue to say them ; and Shakespeare 
here cannot be wholly acquitted of this fault. But at 
other times he speaks from heart to heart with a 
depth of real emotion and wealth of vivid expression 
which has given us some of the noblest poetry in the 
language. 

Another question, more difficult to settle than the 
literary value of these poems, is their value as a reve- 
lation of Shakespeare's own life. If we could take in 
earnest everything which is said in the sonnets, we 
should learn a great many facts about the man who 
wrote them. But modern scholarship seems to feel 
more and more that we cannot take all their statements 
literally. We must remember here again that Shake- 
speare says many things because it was the fashion in 
his day for sonnetteers to say them. For example, he 
gives some eloquent descriptions of the woes of old 
age; but we know that contemporary poets lamented 
about old age when they had not yet reached years of 
discretion ; and consequently we are not at all convinced 
that Shakespeare was either really old or prematurely 
aged. Such considerations need not interfere with our 
enjoyment of the poetry, for the author's imagination 
may have made a poetical fancy seem real to him as he 
wrote ; but they certainly do not lessen our doubts in 
regard to the value of the sonnets as autobiography. The 
majority of the sonnets, at least, cannot be said to throw 
any light on Shakespeare's life. 

There are, however, six sonnets, connected with each 
other in subject, which, more definitely than any of 



SHAKESPEARE'S NONDRAMATIC WORKS 69 

the others, shadow forth a real event in the poet's life. 
These are numbers XL, XLI, XLII, CXXXIII, 
CXXXIV, CXLTV. They seem to show that a 
woman whom the poet loved had forsaken him for the 
man to whom the sonnets are written ; and that the 
poet submits to this, owing to his deep friendship for 
the man. Two of these sonnets are given below. 

SONNET CXLIV 

*' Two loves I have of comfort and despair, 
Which like two spirits do suggest me still : 
The better angel is a man right fair, 

The worser spirit a woman colour'd ill. 
To win me soon to hell, my female evil; 

Tempteth my better angel from my side, 
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil, 

Wooing his purity with her foul pride. 
And whether that my angel be turn'd fiend 

Suspect I may, yet not directly tell : 
But being both from me, both to each friend, 

I guess one angel in another's hell : 
Yet this shall I ne'er know, but live in doubt, 
Till my bad angel fire my good one out." 

SONNET XLI 

"These pretty wrongs that liberty commits, 

When I am sometime absent from thy heart. 
Thy beauty and thy years full well befits, 

For still temptation follows where thou art. 
Gentle thou art, and therefore to be won, 

Beauteous thou art, therefore to be assailed ; 
And when a woman woos, what woman's son 

Will sourly leave her till she have prevailed ? 
Ay me ! but yet thou mightst my seat forbear, 

And chide thy beauty and thy straying youth, 
Who lead thee in their riot even there 



70 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

Where thou art forced to break a twofold truth, 
Hers, by thy beauty tempting her to thee, 
Thine, by thy beauty being false to me." 

Again, in Sonnet CX, we find an allusion to the dis- 
tasteful nature of the actor's profession which seems 
to ring sincere. Thus in a few cases Shakespeare may 
be giving us glimpses into his real heart ; but in general 
the sentiments expressed in his sonnets could be ex- 
plained as due to the literary conventions of this time. 

Other Poems. — The two narrative poems and the 
sonnets make up most of Shakespeare's nondramatic 
poetry. A word may be added about some other 
scattered bits of verse which are connected with his 
name. In 1599 an unscrupulous publisher, named 
William Jaggard, brought out a book of miscellaneous 
poems by various authors, called The Passionate Pil- 
grim. Since Shakespeare was a popular writer, his 
name was sure to increase the sale of any book ; so 
Jaggard, with an advertising instinct worthy of a later 
age, coolly printed the whole thing as the work of 
Shakespeare. As a matter of fact, only a few short 
pieces were by him ; and were probably stolen from 
some private manuscript. 

In 1601 a poem. The Phoenix and the Turtle, was 
also printed as his in an appendix to a longer poem by 
another man. We cannot trust the printer when he 
signs it with Shakespeare's name, and we have no 
other evidence about its authorship ; but the majority 
of scholars believe it to be genuine. Another poem, 
A Lover'' s Complaint, which was printed in the same 
volume with the sonnets in 1609, is of distinctly less 
merit and probably spurious. 



SHAKESPEARE'S NONDRAMATIC WORKS 71 

Lastly, the short poems incorporated in the plays de- 
serve brief notice. In a way they are part of the plots 
in which they are embedded ; but they may also be 
considered as separate lyrics. Several sonnets and 
verses in stanza form occur in Romeo mid Juliet and 
in the early comedies. Three of these were printed 
as separate poems in The Passionate Pilgrim. Far 
more important than the above, however, are the songs 
which are scattered through all the plays early and 
late. Their merit is of a supreme quality ; some of the 
most famous musical composers, inspired by his works, 
have graced them with admirable music. One of the 
most attractive features in his lyrics is their sponta- 
neous ease of expression. They seem to lilt into music 
of their own accord, as naturally as birds sing. The 
best of these are found in the comedies of the Second 
Period and in the romantic plays of the Fourth. " Sigh 
no more, ladies, sigh no more" in Much Ado About 
Nothing ; "Blow, blow, thou winter wind " in As You 
Like it; " Hark, hark, the lark at heaven's gate sings " 
in Cymheline; and "Full fathom five thy father lies" 
in The Tempest, — these and others like them show 
that the author, though primarily a dramatist, could 
be among the greatest of song writers when he tried. 

The following lines taken from the little-read play. 
The Two Gentlemen of Verona, may serve to illustrate 
the perfection of the Shakespearean lyric. 

SONG 

Who is Sylvia ? what is she, 
That all our swains commend her ? 

Holy, fair, and wise is she ; 
The heaven such grace did lend her, 

That she might admired be. 



72 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

Is she kind as she is fair ? 

For beauty lives with kindness : 
Love doth to her eyes repair 

To help him of his blindness, 
And being helped, inhabits there. 

Then to Sylvia let us sing, 

That Sylvia is excelling ; 
She excels each mortal thing 

Upon the dull earth dwelling ; 
To her let us garlands bring. 

Such are Shakespeare's nondramatic writings. Two 
narrative poems with the faults of youth but with 
many redeeming virtues ; one hundred and fifty-four 
sonnets, very unequal in merit but touching at their 
best the high-water mark of English verse ; a few stray 
fragments of disputed authorship and doubtful value; 
and finally a handful of scattered songs, short, but al- 
most perfect of their kind, — this is what we have 
outside of the plays. Neither in quantity nor quality 
can this work compare with the poetic value of the 
great dramas ; but had it been written by any other 
man, we should have thought it wonderful enough. 

On the sonnets, the appendix to Mr. Sidney Lee's book, A Lift 
of William Shakespeare^ 1909, is particularly valuable. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE SEQUENCE OF SHAKESPEARE's PLATS 

The most profitable metliod of studying any writer 
is to take up his works in the order in which they 
were written. More and more this method is being 
adopted toward all authors, ancient and modern, Virgil 
or Milton, Dante or Tennyson. We are thus enabled 
to trace the gradual growth of the poet's mind from 
one production to another, — his constant increase in 
skill, in judgment, in knowledge of mankind. The 
great characteristic of the genius is, not simply that 
he knows more than other men at first, but that he 
has in him such vast possibilities of growth, of improv- 
ing with time, and learning by his own mistakes. Con- 
sequently, it is very important to know that a certain 
play or poem is faulty because it was its author's first 
crude attempt ; that a second is better because it was 
written five years later in the light of added experience; 
and that a third is better still because it came ten 
years after the second, at the climax of the writer's 
powers. 

Besides showing the author's growth, this method 
also shows his relation to the great literary movements 
of his time. As fashions in dress and sports keep 
shifting, fashions in literature are changing just as 
constantly, and the dominant type may alter two or 

73 



74 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

three times during one man's life. If an authoi 
changes to meet these demands, it is important to 
know that one of his plays was merry comedy because 
written at a time when merry comedies filled all the 
playhouses ; and that another is sober tragedy because 
composed while most of the theaters were acting and 
demanding sober tragedy. 

Now Shakespeare not only improved a great deal 
while composing his plays, but also conformed, to 
some extent at least, to the different tastes of his 
audience at different periods of his life. Hence, a 
knowledge of the order in which his plays were written 
is very valuable, and should form the first step in a 
careful study of his writings. 

Unfortunately, when we attempt to arrange Shake- 
speare's plays in chronological order, we encounter 
many practical difiiculties in finding just what this 
order is. We know that Tennyson developed a great 
deal as a poet between the ages of eighteen and thirty- 
three; and we can show this by pointing to four suc- 
cessive volumes of his poems, published respectively 
at the ages of eighteen, twenty-one, twenty-three, and 
thirty-three, and each rising in merit above the one 
before it. We know definitely in what order these 
volumes come, for we find on the title-page of each the 
date when it was printed. But scarcely half of Shake- 
speare's plays were printed in this way during his life. 
The others, some twenty in all, are found only in one 
big folio volume which gives no hint of their proper 
order or year of composition, and which bears on its 
title-page the date of the printing, 1623, seven years 
after Shakespeare died. Many plays, too, published 



SEQUENCE OF SHAKESPEARE S PLAYS 75 

early, were written some years before publication, 
so that the date of printing on the flyleaf of the 
quarto, even where a quarto exists, simply shows that 
the play was written sometime before that year but 
does not tell at all liow long before. How, then, are 
we to trace Shakespeare's growth from year to year, 
through his successive dramas, when the quartos help 
us so little and when the majority of these dramas are 
piled before us in one volume by the editors of the 
First Folio, without a word of explanation as to which 
plays are early attempts and which mature work ? 

At first sight the above problem seems almost hope- 
less. The researches of scholars for over a century, 
however, have gathered together a mass of evidence 
which determines pretty accurately the order in 
which these different plays were written. 

This evidence is of two kinds, external and internal. 
By external evidence we mean that found outside of 
the play, references to it in other books of the time, 
and similar material. By internal evidence we mean 
that found inside of the play itself. 

External Evidence. — This is of several kinds. In 
the first place, every play which was to be printed had 
to be entered in the Stationers' Register, and all these 
entries are dated. Hence we know that certain plays 
were prepared for publication by the time mentioned. 
For instance, " A Book called Antony and Cleopatra " 
was entered May 20, 1608 ; and although apparently 
the book was not finally printed at that time, and al- 
though our only copy of Antony and Cleopatra is that 
in the Folio of 1623, yet we feel reasonably certain from 
this entry that this play must have been written either 



76 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

in 1608 or earlier. In addition to the record of the 
Stationers' Register, we have the dates on the title- 
pages of such plays as appeared in Quarto. These 
evidences, it must be remembered, determine only the 
latest possible date for the play, as many were written 
long before they were printed, or even entered. 

Again, other men sometimes used in their books 
expressions borrowed from Shakespeare or remarks 
which sound like allusions to something of his. 
Here, if we know the date of the other man's book, 
we learn that the play of Shakespeare from which he 
borrowed must have been in existence before that date. 
Thus, when the poet Barksted prints a poem in 
1607 and borrows a passage in it from Measure for 
Measure, we conclude that Measure for Measure must 
have been produced before 1607, or Barksted could 
not have copied from it. This form of evidence has 
its dangers, since occasionally we cannot tell whether 
Shakespeare borrowed from the other man or the 
other man from him ; nevertheless it is often valuable. 

Furthermore, we sometimes find in contemporary 
books or papers, which are dated, an account of the 
acting of some play. A law student named John 
Manningham left a diary in which he records that on 
February 2, 1602 he saw a play called Tivelfth Night or 
What Tou Will in the Hall of the Middle Temple ; and 
his account of the play shows that it was Shake- 
speare's. Dr. Simon Forman, in a similar diary, de- 
scribes the performance of three Shakespearean plays, 
two of the accounts being dated. Still more impor- 
tant in this class is the famous allusion, already 
quoted, by Francis Meres in his Palladis Tamia, a 



SEQUENCE OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS 77 

book published in 1598. In this he mentions with 
high praise six comedies of Shakespeare : The Tiuo 
Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, Lovers 
Labour^ s Lost, Lovers Labour'' s Won,^ A Midsummer 
Night'' s Dream, and Tlie Merchant of Venice ; and six 
" tragedies " : Richard II, Richard III, Henry IV, 
King John, Titus Andronicus, and Romeo and Juliet.^ 
Hence, we know that all these plays were written and 
acted somewhere before 1598, although three of them 
did not appear in print until 1623. 

The above list does not exhaust all the forms of 
external evidence, but merely shows its general 
nature. External evidence, as can be seen, is not 
something mysterious and peculiar, but simply an 
application of common sense to the problem in hand. 

Frequently two pieces of external evidence will ac- 
complish what neither one could do alone. Often one 
fact will show that a play came somewhere before a cer- 
tain date, but not show how long before, and another 
will prove that the play came after another date, without 
telling how long after. For example. King Lear was 
written before 1606, for we have a definite statement 
that it was performed then. It was written after 1603, 
for it borrowed material from a book printed in that 
year. This method of hemming in a play between its 
earliest and its latest possible date is common and 
useful, both with Shakespeare and with other writers. 

Internal Evidence. — By the above methods a few 
plays have been dated quite accurately, and many 
others confined between limits only two or three years 

1 This play is either lost, or preserved under another title. 

2 Quoted in full in Chapter I, p. 10. 



78 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

apart. But many plays are still dated very vaguely, 
and some are not dated at all. For further results we 
must fall back on internal evidence. The first, though 
by no means the most important, form of this consists 
of allusions within the play to contemporary events. If a 
boy should read in an old diary of his grandmother's 
that she had just heard of the fight at Gettysburg, he 
would feel certain that the words were written a few 
days after that great battle, even if there were no 
date anywhere in the manuscript. In the same way, 
when the Prologue of Shakespeare's Henry V alludes 
to the fact that Elizabeth's general (the Earl of Essex) 
is in Ireland quelling a rebellion, we know that this 
was written between April and September of 1599, the 
period during which Essex actually was in Ireland. 
Similarly, certain details in TJie Tempest appear to 
have been borrowed from accounts of the wreck of 
Sir George Somers's ship in 1609. As Shakespeare 
could not have borrowed from these accounts before 
they existed, he must have written his comedy some- 
time after 1609.^ 

But the main form of internal evidence, what is 
usually meant by that term, is the testimony in the 
character and style of the plays themselves as to 
the maturity of the man who wrote them. Just as the 
stump of a tree sawn across shows its age by its 
successive rings of growth, so a poem, if carefully 

1 This form of evidence is usually weak and unreliable. Most of 
the supposed allusions are much more vague than the two given. 
Where there have been similar events in history, the allusion might 
be to one which we had forgotten when we thought it was to a 
similar one which we knew. 



SEQUENCE OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS 79 

examined, shows tlie rings of growth in the author's 
style of thought and expression. 

The simplest and most tangible form of this evidence 
is that which is found in meter. If we read in order 
of composition those plays which we have already 
succeeded in dating, we shall find certain habits of 
versification steadily growing on the author, as play 
succeeded play. 

In the first place, most of the lines in the early 
plays are ^ end-stopped ' ; that is, the sense halts at the 
close of each line with a resulting pause in reading. 
In the later plays the sense frequently runs over from 
one line into another, producing what is called a ' run- 
on ' line instead of an ' end-stopped ' one. By comparing 
the following passages, the first of which contains 
nothing but end-stopped lines and the second several 
run-on lines, the reader can easily see the difference. 

(a) From an early play : — 

*' I from my mistress come to you in post : 
If I return, I shall be post indeed, 
For she will score your fault upon my pate. 
Methinks your maw, like mine, should be your clock, 
And strike you home without a messenger." 

— Comedy of Errors^ I, ii, 63-67. 

(6) From a late play : — 

" Mark your divorce, young sir, [end-stopped] 
"Whom son I dare not call. Thou art too base [run-on] 
To be acknowledg'd. Thou, a sceptre's heir, [end-stopped] 
That thus affects a sheep-hook ! Thou old traitor, 
[end-stopped] 



80 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

I am sorry that by hanging thee I can [run-on] 

But shorten your life one week. And thou, fresh piece 

[run-on] 
Of excellent witchcraft, who of force must know 

[end-stopped] 
The royal fool thou cop'st with . . . — " 

— TVinter's Tale, IV, iv, 427-434. 

Since Shakespeare keeps constantly increasing his 
use of run-on lines in plays for which dates are known, 
it seems reasonable to assume that he did this in all 
his work, that it was a habit which grew on him from 
year to year. Hence, if we sort out his plays in order, 
putting those with the fewest run-on lines first and 
those with the greatest number last, we shall have 
good reason for believing that this represents roughly 
the order in which they were written. 

A second form of metrical evidence is found in the 
proportion of ' masculine ' and ^ feminine ' endings in 
the verse. A line has a masculine ending when its last 
syllable is stressed; when it ends, for example, on 
words or phrases like beJiold', control', no more', begone'. 
On the other hand, if the last stressed syllable of the 
line is followed by an unstressed one, the two together 
are called a feminine ending. Instances of this would 
be lines ending in such words or phrases as, unho'/ly, 
forgive' /me, benight' /ed. ISTotice the difference be- 
tween them in the following passage: — 

" Our revels now are ended. These our actors [feminine] 
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and [masculine] 
Are melted into air, into thin air ; [masculine] 
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, [feminine] 
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, [feminine] 



SEQUENCE OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS 81 

The solemn temples, the great globe itself, [masculine] 
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, [masculine] 
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, [feminine] 
Leave not a rack behind." 

— Tempest, IV, 1, 147-156. 

In the main, although, with some exceptions, the 
number of feminine endings, like the number of run-on 
lines, increases as the plays become later in date. 

A third form of ending, which practically does not 
appear at all in the early plays, and which recurs 
with increasing frequency in the later ones, is what is 
called a ^ weak ending.' ^ This occurs whenever a run- 
on line ends in a word which according to the meter 
needs to be stressed, and according to the sense ought 
not to be. Here there is a clash between meter and 
meaning, and the reader compromises by making a 
pause before the last syllable instead of emphasizing 
the syllable itself. Below are two examples of weak 
endings : — 

" It should the good ship so have swallowed, and 
The fraughting souls within her." 

"I will rend an oak 
And peg thee in his knotty entrails till 
Thou hast howled away twelve winters." 

Lastly, we have the evidence of rime. Run-on 
lines, feminine endings, and weak endings constantly 
increase as Shakespeare grows older. Eime, 6n the 
other hand, in general decreases. The early plays are 

1 Mr. Ingram makes a distinction between " light " and "weak " 
endings. Both are classed together as weak endings above. The 
distinction seems to us too subtle for any but professional students. 
G 



82 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

full of it ; the later ones have very little. It does not 
follow that the chronological order of the individual 
plays could be exactly determined by their percentage 
of riming lines, for subject matter makes a great 
difference. In a staged fairy story, like A Midsum- 
mer NigJifs Dream, the poet would naturally fall into 
couplets. But, other things being equal, a large 
amount of rime is always a sign of early work. 
This is especially true when the rimes occur, not in 
pairs, but in quatrains or sonnet forms, or (as they 
sometimes do in the first comedies) in scraps of sing- 
song doggerel. 

Such is the internal evidence from the various 
changes in versification. Its value, as must always 
be remembered, lies in the fact that the results of 
these different tests in the main agree with each other 
and with such external evidence as we have. 

Then, wholly aside from metrical details, there is a 
large amount of internal evidence of other kinds, — evi- 
dence which cannot be measured by the rule of thumb, 
but which every intelligent reader must notice. We 
feel instinctively that one play mirrors the views and 
emotions of youth, another those of middle age. A 
man's face does not change more between twenty-five 
and forty than his mind changes during the same in- 
terval; and the difference between his thoughts at 
those periods is as distinct often as the difference be- 
tween the rounded lines of youth and the stern features 
of middle age. This is a subject which will be better 
understood in the light of the next chapter. 

The Order of the Plays. — Upon such evidence as has 
been described, a list of Shakespeare's plays in their 



SEQUENCE OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS 83 

chronological order can now be presented. The de- 
tails of evidence on date may be found in the account 
of the plays which appears in Chapters X-XIII. 

Love's Labour's Lost . . . . . . 1590-1591 

The Comedy of Errors 1590-1591 

II and III Henry VI 1590-1592 

Richard III 1592-1593 

Two Gentlemen of Verona 1592 

King John 1592-1593 

Richard II 1593-1594 

Titus Andronicus 1593-1594 

Midsummer Night's Dream 1593-1595 

Romeo and Juliet 1591, revised 1597 

The Merchant of Venice 1594-1596 

The Taming of the Shrew 1596-1597 

I Henry IV 1597 

II Henry IV 1598 

Henry V . . . 1599 

Merry Wives of Windsor 1599 

Much Ado about Nothing 1599 

As You Like It 1599-1600 

Julius C^sar . . . 1599-1601 

Twelfth Night 1601 

Troilus and Cressida 1602 

All's Well That Ends Well 1602 

Hamlet 1602, 1603-1604 (two versions). 

Measure for Measure 1603 

Othello 1604 

King Lear 1604-1605 

Macbeth 1605-1606 

Antony and Cleopatra 1607-1608 

Tim on of Athens . 1607-1608 

Pericles 1608 

Coriolanus 1609 

Cymbeline 1610 

The Winter's Tale . 1610-1611 



84 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

The Tempest 1611 

King Henry the Eighth 1612-1613 

Among the many books and articles on the subject of this 
chapter, the following may be mentioned : Shakespeare Manual 
by F. L. Fleay (Macmillan and Co., London, 1876) ; Shak- 
spere, by E. Dowden (American Book Co., New York); 
Cartce Shakespeariance by D. Sambert. 



CHAPTER VII 

Shakespeare's development as a dramatist 

As the reader will remember, our main aim in at- 
tempting to date Shakespeare's plays was to trace 
through them his development as a dramatist and 
poet. Just as the successive chambers of the nautilus 
shell show the stages of growth of its dead and van- 
ished tenant, so the plays of Shakespeare show how 

"Each new temple, nobler than the last, 
Shut him from heaven with a dome more vast." 

The great thing which distinguishes the genius from 
the ordinary man, we repeat, is his power of constat- 1 
improvement; and we can trace this improvement 
here from achievements less than those of many a 
modern writer up to the noblest masterpieces of all 
time. 

Much of the material connected with this develop- 
ment has already been discussed in another connec- 
tion under Internal Evidence. Internal evidence, 
however, that one play is later than another, is noth- 
ing else than the marks of intellectual growth in 
the poet's mind between those two dates. We arrange 
the plays in order according to indications of intel- 
lectual growth, just as one could fit together again the 
broken fragments of a nautilus shell, guided by the 
relative size of the ever expanding chambers. So, in 

85 



86 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

discussing Shakespeare's development, we must bring 
up mucli old material, examining it from a different 
point of view. 

Meter. — In the first place, the poet develops won- 
derfully in the command of his medium of expression ; 
that is, in his mastery of meter. What is meant by 
the fact that as Shakespeare grew older, wiser, more 
experienced, he used more run-on lines, more weak 
endings, more feminine endings ? Simply this, that 
by means of these devices he gained more variety and 
expressiveness in his verse. A passage from his early 
work (in spite of much that is fine) with every ending 
alike masculine and strong, and with every line end- 
stopped, harps away tediously in the same swing, like 
one lonely instrument on one monotonous note. His 
later verse, on the other hand, with masculine and 
feminine endings, weak ones and strong, end-stopped 
-nd run-on lines, continually relieving each other, is 
like the blended music of a great orchestra, continu- 
ally varying, now stern, now soft, in harmony with 
the thought it expresses. Below are given two pas- 
sages, the first from an early play, the second from a 
late one. In print one may look as well as the other ; 
but if one reads them aloud, he will see in a moment 
how much more variety and expressiveness there is in 
the second, especially for the purposes of acting. 

*' Urge not my father's anger, Eglamour, 
But think upon my grief, a lady's grief, 
And on the justice of my flying hence, 
To keep me from a most unholy match, 
Which heaven and fortune still rewards with plagues. 
I do desire thee, even from a heart 



DEVELOPMENT AS A DRAMATIST 87 

As full of sorrows as the sea of sands, 
To bear me company and go with me ; 
If not, to hide what I have said to thee, 
That I may venture to depart alone. ' ' 

— Two Gentlemen of Verona^ IV, ill, 27-36. 

"By whose aid, 
Weak masters though ye be, I have bedimm'd 
The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds. 
And 'twixt the green sea and the azur'd vault 
Set roaring war ; to the dread rattling thunder 
Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak 
With his own bolt ; the strong-bas'd promontory 
Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up 
The pine and cedar ; graves at my command 
Have wak'd their sleepers, op'd, and let 'em forth 
By my so potent art. But this rough magic 
I here abjure, and, when I have requir'd 
Some heavenly music, which even now I do, 
To work mine end upon their senses that 
This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff, 
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth. 
And deeper than did ever plummet sound 
I'll drown my book." 

— Tempest, V, i, 40-57. 

The same reason shows why Shakespeare used less 
and less rime as his taste and experience ripened. 
Eime is a valuable ornament for songs and lyric 
poetry generally ; but from poetry which is actually 
to be acted on the English stage it takes away the 
most indispensable of all qualities, the natural, life- 
like tone of real speech. Notice this in the difference 
between the two extracts below. Observe how stilted 
and artificial the first one seems ; and see how the 
second combines the melody and dignity of poetry 
with the simple naturalness of living language. 



88 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

** This fellow pecks up wit as pigeons pease, 
And utters it again when God doth please. 
He is wit's pedler, and retails his wares 
At wakes and wassails, meetings, markets, fairs ; 
And we that sell by gross, the Lord doth know, 
Have not the grace to grace it with such show. 
This gallant pins the wenches on his sleeve ; 
Had he been Adam, he had tempted Eve." 

— Lovers Labour^ s Lost, V, ii, 315-322. 

" I was not much afeard ; for once or twice 
I was about to speak and tell him plainly 
The self-same sun that shines upon his court 
Hides not his visage from our cottage, but 
Looks on all alike. Will't please you, sir, be gone ? 
I told you what would come of this. Beseech you, 
Of your own state take care. This dream of mine — 
Being now awake, I'll queen it no inch farther, 
But milk my ewes and weep." 

— Winter's Tale, IV, iv, 452-460. 

I do not mean to imply by the above that Shake- 
speare's early verse is poor according to ordinary stand- 
ards. It is not; it contains much that is fine. But it 
is far inferior to his later work, and it is inferior in 
those very details which time and experience alone can 
teach. 

An important point to remember is that while 
Shakespeare was growing in metrical skill, he was not 
growing alone. A crowd of other authors around him 
were developing in a similar way ; and he was learning 
from them and they from him. The use of blank verse 
in English when Shakespeare began to write was a com- 
paratively new practice, and, like all new inventions, 
for a time it was only imperfectly understood. Men 



DEVELOPMENT AS A DRAMATIST 89 

had to learn by experiments and by each other's suc- 
cesses and failures, just as men in recent years have 
learned to fly. Shakespeare surpassed all the others, 
as the Wright brothers in their first years surpassed 
all their fellow-aeronauts; but like the Wright brothers 
he was only part of a general movement. No other 
man changed as much as he in one lifetime, but the 
whole system of dramatic versification was changing. 

Taste. — But wholly aside from questions of meter, 
Shakespeare improved greatly in taste and judgment 
between the beginning and middle of his career. This 
is shown especially in his humor. To the young man 
humor means nothing but the cause for a temporary 
laugh; to a more developed mind it becomes a pleasant 
sunshine that lingers in the memory long after reading, 
and interprets all life in a manner more cheerful, sym- 
pathetic, and sane. The early comedies give us 
nothing but the temporary laugh ; and even this is pro- 
duced chiefly by fantastic situations or plays on words 
clever but far-fetched, puns and conceits so overworked 
that their very cleverness jars at times. On the other 
hand, in the great humorous characters of his middle 
period, like Falstaff and Beatrice, the poet is opening 
up to us new vistas of quiet, lasting amusement and 
indulgent knowledge of our imperfect but lovable 
fellow-men. 

The same growth of taste is shown in the dramatist's 
increasing tendency to tone down all revolting details 
and avoid flowery, overwrought rhetoric. Nobody knows 
whether Shakespeare wrote all of Titus Andronicus 
entire or simply revised it ; but we feel sure that the 
older Shakespeare would have been unwilling, even as 



90 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

a reviser, to squander so mucli that is beautiful on such, 
an orgy of blood and violence. Romeo and Juliet is 
full of beautiful poetry ; but even here occasional lapses 
show the undeveloped taste of the young writer. No- 
tice the flowery and fantastic imagery in the following 
passage, where Lady Capulet is praising Paris, her 
daughter's intended husband : — 

" Read o'er the volume of young Paris' face 
And find delight writ there with beauty's pen ; 
Examine every married lineament 
And see how one another lends content, 
And what obscur'd in this fair volume lies 
Find written in the m argent of his eyes. 
This precious book of love, this unbound lover, 
To beautify him, only lacks a cover. 
The fish lives in the sea, and 'tis much pride 
Tor fair without the fair within to hide, 
i That book in many's eyes doth share the glory, 

That in gold clasps locks in the golden story." 

— Borneo and Juliet, I, iii, 81-92. 

If we try to picture to ourselves the post-wedlock 
edition of Paris described above, we shall see how a 
young man's imagination may run away with his judg- 
ment. There are passages in this play as good, perhaps, 
as anything which the author ever wrote ; but if we 
compare such fantastic imagery with the uniform ex- 
cellence of the later masterpieces, we shall see how 
much Shakespeare unlearned and outgrew. 

Character Study. — Still more significant is the poet's 
development in the conception of character. In no 
other way, probably, does an observant mind change and 
expand so much as in this. Por the infant all men fall 
into two very simple categories: — people whom he likes 



DEVELOPMENT AS A DRAMATIST 91 

and people whom he doesn't. The boy of ten has in- 
creased these two classes to six or eight. The young 
man of twenty finds a few more, and begins to suspect 
that men who act alike may not have the same motives 
and emotions. But as the keen-eyed observer nears 
middle age, he begins to realize that no two souls are 
exact duplicates of each other; and that behind every 
human eye there lies an undiscovered country, as 
mysterious, as fascinating, as that which Alice found 
behind the looking-glass, — a country like, and yet 
unlike, the one we know, where dreams grow beautiful 
as tropic plants, and passions crouch like wild beasts 
in the jungle. 

Great as he was, Shakespeare had to learn this 
lesson like other men ; but he learned it much better. 
In Love's Labour^s Lost, generally considered his 
earliest play, he has not led us into the inner selves 
of his men and women at all, has not seemed to realize 
that they possess inner selves. At the conclusion we 
know precisely as much of them as we should if we 
had met them at a formal reception, and no more. The 
princess is pretty and clever on dress parade ; but how 
does the real princess feel when parade is over and 
she is alone in her chamber ? The later Shakespeare 
might have told us, did tell us, in regard to more than 
one other princess; but the young Shakespeare has 
nothing to tell. 

Richard III, which is supposed to have come some 
three years later, is a marked advance in characteriza- 
tion, but still far short of the goal. Here the drama- 
tist attempts, indeed, to analyze the tyrant's motives 
and emotions ; but he does not yet understand what 



92 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

he is trying to explain, and for that reason the being 
whom he creates is portentous, but not human. To 
understand this, you need only compare Richard with 
Macbeth. In Macbeth we have a host of different 
forces — ambition, superstition, poetry, remorse, vacil- 
lation, affection, despair — all struggling together 
as they might in you or me; and it is this mingling of 
feelings with which we all can sympathize that makes 
him, in spite of all his crimes, a human being like our- 
selves. But in Richard there is no human complexity. 
His is the fearful simplicity of the lightning, the 
battering-ram, the earthquake, forces whose achieve- 
ments are terrible and whose inner existence a blank. 
Richard hammers his bloody way through life like the 
legendary Iron Man with his flail, awe-inspiring as a 
destructive agency, not as a human being. 

Two or three years later we find Shakespeare in his 
conception of Shylock capable of greater things as a 
student of character. In this pathetic, lonely, vindic- 
tive figure, exiled forever from the warm fireside of 
human friendship by those inherent faults which he 
can no more change than the tiger can change his 
claws, the long tragedy which accompanies the survi- 
val of the fittest finds a voice. Yet even in Shylock 
the dramatist has not reached his highest achievement 
in character study. The old Jew is drawn splendidly 
to the life, but he is a comparatively easy character to 
draw, a man with a few simple and prominent traits. 
Depicting such a man is like drawing a pronounced 
Roman profile, less difficult to do, and less satisfactory 
when done, than tracing the subdued curves of a more 
evenly rounded face. Still greater will be the triumph 



DEVELOPMENT AS A DRAMATIST 93 

when Shakespeare can draw equally true to life a 
many-sided man or woman, in whose single heart all 
our different experiences find a sympathetic echo. 

And this final triumph is not long in coming. Be- 
tween his thirty-fourth and thirty-eighth years, in 
Falstaff and Hamlet the poet produced the greatest 
comic and the greatest tragic character of dramatic 
history. The man who has read Hamlet understand- 
in gly has found in the young prince a lifelong com- 
panion. Has he been unjustly treated ? Hamlet, 
too, had suffered and hated. Has he loved ? So had 
Hamlet. Has he had a bosom friend? The most sacred 
and beautiful of college friendships was that between 
Hamlet and Horatio. Has he been bored by some 
stupid old adviser ? So had Hamlet by Polonius and 
similar " tedious old fools." Has he been thrilled by 
some beautiful landscape ? Hamlet, too, had admired 
"this goodly frame, the earth" and the sky, "that 
majestical roof fretted with golden fire." Has he had 
a parent whom he loved and admired ? So had Hamlet 
in his father. Has he had a friend for whom his love 
was mixed with shame? So felt Hamlet toward his 
mother. Has he felt the pride of a great deed bravely 
accomplished ? So did Hamlet in dying. Has he felt 
the shame and remorse of a duty unperformed ? So 
did Hamlet while his father was still unrevenged. 
Has he shuddered at the mystery of death ? So had 
Hamlet shuddered at "that undiscovered country." 
Or has he been racked, as all good men are in practi- 
cal life, by the doubt as to what is his duty? So 
had Hamlet been racked by the same terrible responsi- 
bility. And thus we might go on indefinitely. The 



94 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

experience of a lifetime is packed into this play. 
Shakespeare never surpassed Hamlet, though he wrote 
for nine or ten years after ; but when he had once 
reached this high level, he maintained it, with only 
occasional lapses, to the end. 

Dramatic Technique. — Lastly, Shakespeare developed 
greatly in dramatic technique. By dramatic technique 
we mean the method in which the machinery of the 
story is handled. The dramatist, to do his duty prop- 
erly, must accomplish at least five things at once. 
He must make his play lifelike and natural ; he must 
keep his hearers well informed as to what is happening ; 
he must bring in different events after each other in 
rapid succession to hold the interest of his audience ; he 
must make the different characters influence each other 
so that the whole becomes one connected story, not 
several unrelated ones ; and he must rq,ake the audience 
feel that the play is working toward a certain inevi- 
table end, must bring it to that end, and must then 
stop. The lack of any one of these factors may make 
a play either dull or disappointing. It takes ability 
to get any one of these alone. It takes years of train- 
ing before even a born genius can work them all in 
together. Of course, these details are much easier to 
handle in dramatizing some subjects than others; and 
we find Shakespeare succeeding comparatively early 
in easy subjects and making mistakes later in harder 
ones ; but, on the whole, in dramatic technique as in 
other things, his history is one of increasing power 
and judgment. 

Here, again, as in his metrical development, Shake- 
speare was merely one leading figure in a popular 



DEVELOPMENT AS A DRAMATIST 95 

movement. Through, a long evolution the English 
drama had just come into existence when he began to 
write. There were no settled theories about this new 
art. no results of long experience such as lie at the 
service of the modern dramatist. All men were ex- 
perimenting, and Shakespeare among the rest. 

His early play of Love's Labour^ s Lost has already 
been used to illustrate lack of characterization. In 
technique, also, in spite of many marks of natural 
brilliance, it shows the faults of the beginner. The 
story in the first three acts does not move on fast 
enough ; there is a lack of that rapid series of connected 
events which we mentioned above and which adds so 
much to the interest of the later plays, like Macbeth. 
Likewise, the characters in the prose underplot (except 
Costard) have too little connection with the story of the 
king and his friends. In very badly constructed plays 
this lack of connection sometimes goes so far that the 
main and under plots seem like two separate serial 
stories in a magazine, in which the reader alternates 
from one to the other, but never thinks of them as one. 
This obviously is bad, for just when the reader is most 
interested in one, he is interrupted and has to lay it 
aside for the other. No play of Shakespeare's errs 
so far as that ; but the defect in Lovers Labour'' s Lost 
is similar in a very modified form. Neither is this 
comedy as successful as the author's later plays in 
preparing us for a certain ending as the inevitable 
outcome and then placing that ending before us. We 
are led to expect that all four love affairs must be 
successful, and shall feel disappointed if the sympa- 
thetic dreams which we have woven around that idea 



96 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

are not satisfied. Yet the play ends hurriedly in a 
way which leaves us all in doubt, and disappointed, 
like guests who have been invited to a wedding and 
find it indefinitely postponed. There is a wonderful 
amount of clever dialogue in this comedy, but its 
structure shows how much the author had yet to learn. 

The Two Gentleman of Verona, probably written a 
little later, shows improvement, but by no means per- 
fect mastery. The first two acts still drag, although 
the play moves more rapidly when it is under way. 
The inability to lead up naturally to an inevitable end 
still persists. The young author, well as he has man- 
aged the middle of the play, does not wait for events 
to take their logical course. He winds up everything 
abruptly like a man who has just changed his mind 
or become tired of his task, and marries the most lov- 
able girl in the play to a rascal who is scarcely given 
time for even a pretense of reformation. 

The Merchant of Venice, two or three years later, 
shows a great advance in technique as in other ways. 
Notice how skillfully the dramatist makes the different 
characters all influence each other's lives, so that the 
interest in one becomes the interest in all. There is 
one story in the relations of Shylock and Antonio, 
another in the love affair of Lorenzo and Jessica, and 
a third in Bassanio's courtship of Portia. There is 
also a fourth, a sequel to Bassanio's courtship, 
in the trick which his wife plays on him with re- 
gard to the rings after they are married. Yet we 
never feel an unpleasant interruption when we are 
stopped in one story and started in one of the others, 
because the interest of the first lives on in the second, 



DEVELOPMENT AS A DRAMATIST 97 

owing to the interrelation of the people taking part in 
both. We leave Shylock's story to take up Jessica's, 
but Jessica is Shylock's child, and our interest in the 
fate of his ducats and his daughter, which began in 
his story, goes on in hers. We leave Antonio's story 
to take up Bassanio's ; but Antonio's story was that 
of sacrifice for a friend, and in Bassanio's we see the 
fruit of that sacrifice in his friend's joy. Moreover, 
all four of the above threads of action are knotted to- 
gether in one scene where Bassanio chooses the right 
casket. Of the swift succession of exciting scenes of 
the natural way in which these lead up to the final 
end, of the lifelike truthfulness with which each little 
event is made to work itself out, there is no need to 
speak here. 

Though Shakespeare was not a third through his 
literary career when he wrote The Merchant of Venice, 
he had by this time mastered the technique of comedy ; 
and we need trace his course in it no farther. Much 
Ado and Twelfth Night somewhat later, and Tlie Tem- 
pest long years after, are simply repetitions so far as 
technique is concerned, of this early triumph. Let us 
turn now from comedy to those plays which deal with 
the sterner side of life. Here the development in 
technical skill is similar, but much slower, requiring 
nearly a lifetime before it reaches perfection, for the 
poet is grappling with a problem so difficult that it 
taxed all the resources of his great genius. 

Before 1599 nearly all Shakespeare's plays which 
were not comedies were histories. By a history or 
chronicle play we mean a play which pictures some 
epoch in the past of the English nation. In one sense 

H 



98 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

of the word, most of them are tragedies, since they 
frequently result in death and disaster ; but they are 
always separated as a class from tragedy proper, be- 
cause they represent some great event in English 
national life centering around some king or leader ; 
while tragedy proper deals with the misfortunes of 
some one man in any country, and regards him as an 
individual rather than as a national figure. They dif- 
fer also in purpose, since the chronicle play was in- 
tended to appeal to Anglo-Saxon patriotism, the 
tragedy to our sympathy with human suffering in 
general. 

The first and crudest of Shakespeare's histories 
written at about the same time as his first comedy is 
the triple play of Henry VI} We should hesitate to 
judge him by this, since he wrote it only in part ; but 
it is a woefully rambling production in which we no 
sooner become interested in one character than we lose 
him, and are asked to transfer our sympathies to an- 
other. Richard III is a great step forward in this 
respect ; for the excitement and interest focuses unin- 
terruptedly on the one central figure ; and his influence 
on other men and theirs on him bind all the events of the 
drama into one coherent whole. Also, it moves straight 
on to a definite end which we know and wish and are 
prepared for beforehand. We feel, even in the midst 
of his success, that such a bloody tyrant cannot be tol- 
erated forever ; and like men in a tiger hunt we thrill 
beforehand at the dramatic catastrophe which we know 
is coming. Richard III, though a powerful play, is 

1 These plays are throughout designated as J, II, and III Henry 
VI. 



DEVELOPMENT AS A DRAMATIST 99 

still crude in many details. The scenes where Margaret 
curses her enemies, though strong as poetry, lack action 
as drama. In a wholly different way, they clog the 
onward movement of the story almost as much as some 
scenes in Love's Labour's Lost. Then again, one of the 
most important requirements for good technique is that 
everything shall be true to life. When Anne, for the 
sake of a little bare-faced flattery, marries a man' whom 
she loathes, we feel that no real woman would have 
done this. From that moment Anne becomes a mere 
paper automaton tons, and we can no longer be interested 
in her as we would in a living woman. The motiva- 
tion, as it is called, the art of showing adequately why 
every person should act as he or she does, is sadly 
lacking. 

Moving onward a few years, we find marked improve- 
ment in / Henry IV. It is indeed not technically 
perfect, - — in fact, Shakespeare in the chronicle play 
never attained what seems to modern students tech- 
nical perfection, — but its minor defects are thrown 
into shadow by its splendid virtues. The three stories 
of Hotspur, the King, and the Ealstaff group, though 
partially united by their common connection with 
Prince Hal, do not blend together as perfectly as the 
different plots in The Merchant of Venice, and there is 
some truth in the idea that the play has four heroes in- 
stead of one. But in spite of this, its general impres- 
sion as a great panorama of English life is remarkably 
clear and delightful; and it improves on Richard III in 
its swift succession of incident, and vastly surpasses it 
in the lifelike truth of its motivation. 

In the middle of his career Shakespeare dropped 



100 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

the chronicle play, and instead began the writing of 
tragedies proper. He carried into this, however, the 
lessons learned from his experience with histories, and 
continued to improve. Julius Ccesar marks the tran- 
sition from chronicle play to tragedy. The lack of 
close connection between the third and fourth acts and 
the absence of one central hero are characteristic de- 
fects of the chronicle play which the dramatist had not 
yet outgrown. Hamlet, coming next, has shaken off 
all the lingering relics of the older type. Of its general 
excellence there is no need to speak. Yet even in Ham- 
let the action at times halts and becomes disjointed. 
Ccesar and Hamlet are great plays, the latter, perhaps, 
the greatest of all plays ; but, transfigured as they are 
by genius, they show that in the difficult problem of 
tragic technique the author was learning still. At the 
age of forty, approximately, and a year or two after 
Hamlet, Shakespeare produced Othello, the most perfect, 
although not necessarily the greatest, of all his great 
tragedies. It is less profoundly reflective than Hamlet 
and less passionately imaginative than King Lear or 
Macbeth; but no other of his masterpieces shows such 
perfect balance of taste and judgment, or is so free 
from any jarring note. Hence, through the histories 
and tragedies taken together, we see the same growth 
in technical skill which we have already found in his 
comedies, save that it took longer here because the 
poet was working in a more difficult field. It would 
not be true to say that each play up to Othello is superior 
to its immediate predecessor in technique, still less 
that it is so in absolute merit j but the general upward 
tendency is there. 



DEVELOPMENT AS A DRAMATIST 101 

The Four Periods. — Such was Shakespeare's develop- 
ment in meter, in taste, in conception of character, and 
in dramatic technique. In line with this development, 
it has been customary to divide his literary career into 
four periods and his plays into four corresponding 
groups. These groups or periods are characterized 
partly by their different degrees of maturity, but more 
by the difference in the character of the plays during 
these intervals. 

The First Period includes all plays which there is 
good reason for dating before 1595. In this the great 
dramatist was serving his literary apprenticeship, 
learning the difficult art of play writing, and learning 
it by experiments and mistakes. In the course of his 
experiments, he tried many different types, tragedies, 
histories, comedies, and rewrote old plays either alone 
or with a more experienced playwright to help him. 
Nearly all of this work is full of promise ; most of it 
is also full of faults. Here belong the early comedies 
mentioned above — Lovers Labour^ s Lost and The Two 
Gentlemen of Verona. Here is the crude but powerful 
Richard III, and Romeo and Juliet, the early faults of 
which are redeemed by such a wealth of youthful 
poetic fire. 

The Second Period extends roughly from 1595 to 
1600. The poet has learned his profession now, is no 
longer a beginner but a master, though hardly yet at 
the summit of his powers. Here are included three 
chronicle plays, the two parts of King Henry /Fand 
King Henry V, and six comedies. One of the earliest of 
these comedies was The Merchant of Venice, already men- 
tioned. Three others, a little later, — Much Ado, Twelfth 



102 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

Night, and As You Like It, — are usually regarded 
as Shakespeare's crowning achievement in the world 
of mirth and humor. In this group of plays, whether 
history or comedy, the author is depicting chiefly the 
cheerful, energetic side of life. 

The Third Period really begins about 1599, for this 
and the second overlap ; and it continues to about 1608. 
In the plays of this group the poet becomes interested 
in a wholly new set of themes. The aspects of life 
which he interprets are no longer bright and cheer- 
ful, but stern and sad. Here come the great tragedies, 
several of which we have mentioned above — Julius 
Ccesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony 
and Cleopatra. Shakespeare is now at the height of 
his power, for his greatest masterpieces are included in 
the above list. Mixed in with this wealth of splendid 
tragedy (though inferior to it in merit), there are also 
three comedies. But even the comedies share in the 
somber gloom which absorbed the poet's attention dur- 
ing this period. The comedies before 1600 had been 
full of sunshine, brimming with kindly, good-natured 
mirth, overflowing with the genial laughter which 
makes us love the very men at whom we are laughing. 
But the three comedies of this Third Period are bitter 
and sarcastic in their wit, making us despise the people 
who furnish us fun, and leaving an unpleasant taste 
in the mouth after the laugh is over. Some have 
assumed that the dark tinge of this period was due to 
an unknown sorrow in the poet's own life, but there seems 
to be no need of any such assumption. We may be- 
come interested in reading cheerful books one year 
and sad ones the next without being more cheerful or 



DEVELOPMENT AS A DRAMATIST 103 

more sad in one year than in the other ; and what is 
true of the reader might reasonably be true of the 
writer. But whatever the cause which influenced 
Shakespeare, the tragedies of this group are the saddest 
as well as the greatest of all his plays. 

The Fourth and last Period contains plays written 
after 1608-1609. There are only five of these, and since 
Pericles and Henry VIII ^^Q in large part by other hands, 
our interest focuses chiefly on the remaining three — 
The Tempest, Cymbeline, and The Winter^s Tale. All 
the plays of this period end happily and are wholly 
free from the bitterness of the Third Period comedy. 
Nevertheless, they have little of the rollicking, up- 
roarious fun of the earlier comedies. Their charm lies 
rather in a subdued cheerfulness, a quiet, pure, sympa- 
thetic serenity of tone, less strenuous, but even more 
poetic, than what had gone before. In some ways they 
are hardly equal to the great tragedies just mentioned, 
for the poet is growing older now, and the fiery vigor of 
Macbeth is fading out of his verse. But in loftiness of 
thought and tenderness of feeling these later romances 
are equal to anything that the author ever gave us. 

Whether other causes influenced him or not, Shake- 
speare was doubtless in these four periods conforming 
to some extent to the literary tendencies of the hour. 
The writings of his contemporaries also show a larger 
percentage of comedies between 1595-1600 than between 
1590-1595. Many other dramatists, too, were writing 
histories while he was, and dropped them at about the 
same time. Likewise during his Fourth Period three- 
quarters of all the plays written by other men were 
comedies, the most successful of them in a similar 



104 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

romantic tone. On the whole, too, other writers pro- 
duced a rather larger percentage of tragedies during 
1601-1607 than at any other time while Shakespeare 
was writing, although the change was not nearly as 
marked in them as in him. But whether the influence 
of contemporaries was great or small, these periods 
exist; and the individual plays can be better under- 
stood if read in the light of the groups to which they 
belong. 

Perhaps the best book on Shakespeare's development as a 
dramatist is : The Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist 
by G. P. Baker (The Macmillan Co., New York, 1907). 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE CHIEF SOURCES OF SHAKESPEARE's PLAYS 

Shakespeare and Plagiarism. — Among the curious 
alterations in public sentiment that have come in the 
last century or two, none is more striking than the 
change of attitude in regard to what is called " plagiar- 
ism.'* Plagiarism may be defined as the appropriation 
for one's own use of the literary ideas of another. 
The laws of patent and of copyright have led us into 
thinking that the ideas of a play must not be borrowed 
in any degree, but must originate in every detail with 
the writer. This is as if we should say to an inventor, 
" Yes, you may have invented a safety trigger for re- 
volvers, but you must not apply it to revolvers until 
you have invented a completely new type of revolver 
from the original matchlock." 

- But the playwright of to-day cannot help plagiarizing 
his technique, many of his situations, and even his plots 
from earlier plays; consequently, he tries to conceal 
his borrowings, to placate public opinion by changing 
the names and the environment of his characters. 

The Elizabethan audiences were less exacting. If a 
play about King Lear were written and acted with some 
success, they thought it perfectly honest for another 
dramatist to use this material in building up a new and 
better play on the story of King Lear. They cared 

105 



106 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

even less when the dramatist went to other dramas for 
hints on minor details. The modern audience, if not 
the modern world at large, holds the same view. So 
long as the mind of the borrower transforms and makes 
his own whatever he borrows, so long will his work be 
applauded by his audience, whatever be the existing 
state of the copyright laws or of public fastidious- 
ness. 

Hence we do not to-day hunt up the sources of 
Shakespeare's plots and characters in order to prove 
plagiarism, but in order to understand just how great 
was the power of his genius in transmuting common 
elements into his fine gold. 

It is customary to say: ^'Shakespeare did not in- 
vent his plots. He was not interested in plots." So 
far is this from the truth that the amount of pains and 
skill spent by him in working over any one of his best 
comedies or tragedies would more than sufiB.ce for the 
construction of a very good modern plot. It is more 
true to say of most of his work, " Shakespeare did not 
waste his time in inventing stories.^ He took stories 
where he found them, realized their dramatic possibili- 
ties, and spent infinite pains in weaving them together 
into a harmonious whole." 

There is one other point to remember. The sources 
of Shakespeare's plays were no better literary ma- 
terial than the sources of most Elizabethan plays. 
Shakespeare's practice in adapting older plays was 

1 There are two plays at least which have plots probably original 
with Shakespeare — Love's Labour's Lost and The Tempest. Both 
of these draw largely, however, from contemporary history and 
adventure, and the central idea is directly borrowed from actual 
events. 



SOURCES OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS 107 

the common practice of the time. We can measure, 
therefore, the greatness of Shakespeare's achievement 
by a comparison with what others have made out of 
similar material. 

Just as Shakespeare's plays fall into the groups of 
history, tragedy, and comedy, so his chief sources 
are three in number: biography, as found in the 
Chronicle of Holinshed and Plutarch's Lives ; romance, 
as found in the novels of the period, which were most 
of them translations from Italian novelle ; and dramatic 
material from other plays. 

Holinshed. — Raphael Holinshed (died 1580?) pub- 
lished in 1578 a history of England, Scotland, and 
Ireland, usually known as Holinshed's Chronicle. 
The two immense folio volumes contain an account 
of Britain ^'from its first inhabiting" up to his own 
day, largely made up by combining the works of pre- 
vious historians. The Chronicle bears evidence, how- 
ever, of enormous and painstaking research which 
makes it valuable even now. Holinshed's style was 
clear, but not possessed of any distinctly literary 
quality. Much of what Shakespeare used was indeed 
but a paraphrase of an earlier chronicler, Edward 
Hall. Holinshed was uncritical, too, since he made 
no attempt to separate the legendary from the truly 
historical material. So far as drama is concerned, 
however, this was rather a help than a hindrance, 
since legend often crystallizes most truly the spirit of 
a career in an act or a saying which never had basis 
in fact. The work is notable chiefly for its patriotic 
tone, of which there is certainly more than an echo in 
Shakespeare's historical plays. But the effects of 



108 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

steadfast continuity of national purpose, of a belief in 
the greatness of England, and of an insistent appeal 
to patriotism, which are such important elements in 
Shakespeare's histories, are totally wanting in Hol- 
inshed. 

Not only are all of the histories of Shakespeare 
based either directly or through the medium of other 
plays upon Holinshed, but his two great tragedies, 
Macbeth and King Lear (the latter through an earlier 
play), and his comedy Cymbeline are also chiefly in- 
debted to it. The work was, moreover, the source of 
many plays by other dramatists. 

Plutarch. — Plutarch of Chaeronea, a Greek author 
of the first century a.d., wrote forty-six "parallel" 
Lives, of famous Greeks and Romans. Each famous 
Greek was contrasted with a famous Roman whose 
career was somewhat similar to his own. The Lives 
have been ever since among the most popular of the 
classics, for they are more than mere biographies. They 
are the interpretation of two worlds, with all their 
tragic history, by one who felt the fatal force of a 
resistless destiny. 

A scholarly French translation of Plutarch's Lives 
was published in 1559 by Jacques Amyot, Bishop of 
Bellozane. Twenty years after (1579) Thomas North, 
later Sir Thomas, published his magnificent English 
version.^ The vigor and spirit which he flung into 
his work can only be compared to that of William 
Tyndale in his translation of the New Testament. 
Here was very different material for drama from the 

1 It is not unlikely that it was the second edition published in 
1595 by Richard Field (Shakespeare's printer) that the poet read. 



SOURCES OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS 109 

dry bones of history offered by Holinsbed. Shake- 
speare paid North the sincerest compliment by bor. 
rowing, particularly in Antony and Cleopatra, and 
GoriolanuSy not only the general story, but whole 
speeches with only those changes necessary for mak- 
ing blank verse out of prose. The last speeches of 
Antony and Cleopatra are indeed nearly as impressive 
in North's narrative form as in Shakespeare's play. 

In addition to the tragedies already named, Julius 
Coesar and almost certainly the suggestion of Timon 
of Athens, though not the play as a whole, were taken 
from Plutarch's Lives. Other Elizabethans were not 
slow to avail themselves of this unequaled treasure- 
house of story. 

Italian and Other Fiction. — Except for Geoffrey 
Chaucer (1338-1400), whose Troilus and Criseyde 
Shakespeare dramatized, and John Gower (died 1408), 
whose Confessio Amantis is one of the books out of 
which the plot of Pericles may have come, there was 
little good English fiction read in the Elizabethan 
period. Educated people read, instead, Italian novelle, 
or short tales, which were usually gathered into some 
collection of a hundred or so. Many of these were 
translated into English before Shakespeare's time ; 
and a number of similar collections had been made by 
English authors, who had translated good stories 
whenever they found them. 

One of these was Gli Heccatommithi, 1565 (The 
Hundred Tales), by Giovanni Giraldi, surnamed 
Cinthio, which was later translated into French and 
was the source of Measure for Measure and Othello. 
Another collection was that of Matteo Bandello, whose 



110 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

Tales, 1554-1573, translated into French by Belief orest, 
furnished the sources of Much Ado About Nothingy 
and perhaps Twelfth Night. The greatest of these 
collections was the Decameron, c. 1353, by Giovanni 
Boccaccio, one of whose stories, translated by William 
Painter in his Palace of Pleasure, 1564, furnished the 
source of AlVs Well That Ends Well. Another story 
of the Decameron was probably the source of the 
romantic part of the plot of Cymbeline. The Merry 
Wives of Windsor had a plot like the story in Stra- 
parola's Tredici Piacevole Notte (1550), Thirteen Pleas- 
ant Evenings; and The Merchant of Venice borrows its 
chief plot from Giovanni Fiorentino's II Pecorone. 

Two of Shakespeare's plays are based on English 
novels written somewhat after the Italian manner — 
As You Like It on Thomas Lodge's novel-poem, Rosa- 
lynde, and The Wiiitefs Tale from Robert Greene's 
Pandosto. The Two Gentlemen of Verona is from a 
Spanish story in the Italian style, the Diana of Jorge 
de Montemayor. The Comedy of Errors from Plautus 
is his only play based on classical sources. 

The Italian novelle emphasized situation, but had 
little natural dialogue and still less characterization. 
The Elizabethan dramatists used them only for their 
plots. Never did works of higher genius spring from 
less inspired sources. 

The Plays used by Shakespeare. — Although Shake- 
speare made up one of his plots, the Comedy of Errors, 
from two plays of Plautus (254-184 e.g.), the Me- 
naechmi and Amphitruo, the rest of the plays he 
used for material were contemporary work. He 
borrowed from them plots and situations, and occa- 



SOURCES OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS 111 

sionally even lines. With, the exception, however, of 
one of the early histories, the plays he made use of 
are in themselves of no value as literature. Their 
sole claim to notice is that they served the need of 
the great playwright. None but the student will ever 
read them. In practically every case Shakespeare so 
developed the story that the fiction became essentially 
his own ; while the poetic quality of the verse, the 
development of character, and the heightening of 
dramatic effect, which, he built upon it, left no more of 
the old play in sight than the statue shows of the bare 
metal rods upon which the sculptor molds his clay. 

Seven histories go back to the earlier plays on the 
kings of England. The Second and Third Parts of 
Henry VI are taken from two earlier plays often 
called the First and Second Contentions (between the 
two noble houses of York and Lancaster). The First 
and Second parts of Henry IV, and Henry V, are all 
three an expansion of a cruder production, the Famous 
Victories of Henry V. Richard III is based upon the 
True Tragedie of Richard, Duke of York; King John 
upon the Troublesome Reigne of John, King of England, 
the latter undoubtedly the best of the sources of 
Shakespeare's Histories. 

King Leir and His Daughters is the only extant 
play which is known to have formed the basis of a 
Shakespearean tragedy. Shakespeare made additions 
in this case from other sources, borrowing Glouces- 
ter's story from Sidney's Arcadia. The earlier play of 
Hamlet, which it is believed Shakespeare used, is not 
now in existence. 

Among the comedies, the Taming of the Shrew is 



112 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

directly based upon the Taming of a Shrew. Measure 
for Measure is less direct, borrowing from George 
Whetstone's play in two parts, Promos and Cassandra 
(written before 1578). 

The existence of versions in German and Dutch of 
plays which present plots similar in structure to 
Shakespeare's, but less highly developed, leads scholars 
to advance the theory that several lost plays may 
have been sources for some of his dramas. Entries 
or mentions of plays, with details like Shakespeare's, 
dated earlier than his own plays could have been in 
existence, are also used to further the same view. 
The Two Gentlemen of Verona, the Merchant of Venice, 
Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and, with less reason, Timon 
of Athens, and Twelfth Night, are thought to have been 
based more or less on earlier lost plays. 

Finally, a number of plays perhaps suggested de- 
tails in Shakespeare's plays. Of plays so influenced, 
Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and Henry VIII are the 
chief. But the debt is negligible at best, so far as 
the general student is concerned. 

To conclude, what Shakespeare borrowed was the 
raw material of drama. What he gave to this material 
was life and art. No better way of appreciating the 
dramatist at his full worth could be pursued than a 
patient perusal and comparison of the sources of his 
plays with Shakespeare's own work. 

The best books on this subject are : H. E. D. Anders, 
Shakespeare's Books (Berlin, 1904J ; Shakespeare'' s Library, 
ed. J. P. Collier and W. C. Hazlitt (London, 1875); and the new 
Shakespeare Library now being published by Chatto and 
Windus, of which several volumes are out. 



CHAPTER IX 

HOW SHAKESPEARE GOT INTO PRINT 

The Elizabethan audiences wlio filled to overflowing 
the theaters on the Bankside possessed a far purer 
text of Shakespeare than we of this later day can 
boast. In order to understand our own editions of 
Shakespeare, it is necessary to understand something, 
at least, of the conditions of publishing in Shakespeare's 
day and of the relations of the playhouses with the 
publishers. 

The printing of Shakespeare's poems is an easy tale, 
Venus and Adonis in 1593, and The Rape of Lucrece 
in 1594, were first printed in quarto by E-ichard Field, 
a native of Stratford, who had come to London. In 
each case a dedication accompanying the text was 
signed by Shakespeare, so that we may guess that the 
poet not only consented to the printing, but took care 
that the printing should be accurate. Twelve editions 
of one, eight of the other, were issued before 1660. 
The other volume of poetry, the Sonnets, was printed 
in 1609 by Thomas Thorpe, without Shakespeare's con- 
sent. Two of them, numbers 138 and 144, had ap- 
peared in the collection known as The Passionate Pil- 
grim, a pirated volume printed by W. Jaggard in 
1599. No reedition of the Sonnets appeared till 1640. 

With regard to the plays it is different. It is first 
I 113 



114 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

to be said that in no volume containing a play or plays 
of Shakespeare in existence to-day is there any evi- 
dence that Shakespeare saw it through the press. All 
we can do is to satisfy ourselves as to how the copy of 
Shakespeare's plays may have got into the hands of 
the publishers, and as to how far that copy represents 
what Shakespeare must have written. 

The editions of Shakespearean plays may be divided 
into two groups, — the separate plays which were 
printed in quarto^ volumes before 1623, and the First 
Folio of Shakespeare, which was printed in 1623, 
a collected edition of all his plays save Pericles. Our 
text of Shakespeare, whatever one we read, is made 
up, either from the First Folio text, or in certain 
cases from the quarto volumes of certain plays which 
preceded the Folio; together with the attempts to 
restore to faulty places what Shakespeare must have 
written — a task which has engaged a long line of dili- 
gent scholars from early in the eighteenth century up 
to our own day. 

The Stationers' Company. — In the early period of Eng- 
lish printing, which began about 1480 and lasted up to 
1557, there was very little supervision over the publish- 
ing of books, and as a result the competition was un- 
scrupulous. There was a guild of publishers, called 

1 A quarto volume, or quarto, is a book which is the size of a 
fourth of a sheet of printing paper. The sheets are folded twice 
to make four leaves or eight pages, and the usual size is about 6x9 
in. A folio is a volume of the size of a half sheet of printing 
paper. The paper is folded once and bound in the middle, the 
usual size being about 9 x 12 in. The divisions of the book made by 
thus folding sheets of paper are called quires, and may consist of 
four or eight leaves. 



HOW SHAKESPEARE GOT INTO PRINT 115 

the Stationers' Company, in existence, but its efforts 
to control its members were only of a general charac- 
ter. In 1557, however, Philip and Mary granted a 
charter to the Stationers' Company under which no 
one not a member of the Stationers' Company could 
legally possess a printing press. Queen Mary was, of 
course, interested in controlling the press directly 
through the Crown. Throughout the Elizabethan 
period the printing of books was directly under the 
supervision of Her Majesty's Government, and not 
under the law courts. Every book had to be licensed 
by the company. The Wardens of the company 
acted as licensers in ordinary cases, and in doubtful 
cases the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of 
London, or some other dignitary appointed for the 
purpose. When the license was granted, the permis- 
sion to print was entered upon the Register of the 
compan}'-, and it is from these records that much im- 
portant knowledge about the dates of Shakespeare's 
plays is gained. 

The Stationers' Company was interested only in 
protecting its members from prosecution and from 
competition. The author was not considered by them 
in the legal side of the transaction. How the printer 
got his manuscript to print was his own affair, not 
theirs. 

Many authors were at that time paid by printers 
for the privilege of using their manuscript ; but it was 
not considered proper that a gentleman should be paid 
for literary work. Robert Greene, the playwright and 
novelist, wrote regularly in the employ of printers. 
On the other hand, Sir Philip Sidney "^^ co'^t^^Dorary 



116 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

of Shakespeare's, did not allow any of his writings to 
be printed during his lifetime. Francis Bacon pub- 
lished his essays only in order to forestall an un- 
authorized edition, and others of the time took the 
same course. Bacon says in his preface that to prevent 
their being printed would have been a troublesome 
procedure. It was possible for an author to prevent 
the publication by prosecution, but it was scarcely a 
wise thing to do, in view of the legal difficulties in the 
way. Nevertheless, fear of the law probably acted as 
some sort of a check on unscrupulous publishers. 

The author of a play was, however, really less in- 
terested than the manager who had bought it. The 
manager of a theater seems, from what evidence we 
possess, to have believed that the printing of a play 
injured the chances of success upon the stage. The 
play was sold by the author directly to the manager, 
whose property it became. Copies of it might be sold 
to some printer by some of the players in the company, 
by the manager himself, or, in rarer cases, by some 
unscrupulous copyist taking down the play in short- 
hand at the performance. When a play had got out 
of date, it would be more apt to be sold than while it 
was still on the stage. In some cases, however, the 
printing might have no bad effect upon the attendance 
at its performances. 

During the years before 1623, seventeen of Shake- 
speare's plays were published in quarto. Two of these, 
Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, were printed in two 
very different versions, so that we have nineteen 
texts of Shakespeare's plays altogether published 
before the First Folio. A complete table of these 



HOW SHAKESPEARE GOT INTO PRINT 117 

plays with the dates in which the quartos appeared, 
follows : — 

1594. Titus Andronicus. Later quartos in 1600 and 1611. 
1597. Richard II. Later quartos in 1598, 1608, and 1615. 
1597. Richard III. Later quartos in 1598, 1602, 1605, 1612, 
and 1622. 

1597. Romeo and Juliet. Later quartos in 1599 (corrected edi- 

tion) and 1609. 

1598. I Henry IV. Later quartos in 1599, 1604, 1608, 1613, 

and 1622. 
1598. Love's Labour's Lost. 
1600. Merchant of Venice. Later quarto in 1619, (Copying 

on the title-page the original date of 1600, however.) 
1600. Henry V. Later quartos in 1602 and 1619. (Dated on 

the title-page, 1608.) 
1600. Henry IV, Part II. 
1600. Midsummer Night's Dream. Later quarto in 1619. 

(Dated, however, 1600.) 

1602. Merry Wives of Windsor. Later quarto in 1619. 

1603. Hamlet. 

1604. Second edition of Hamlet. Later quartos in 1605 and 

161 L 
1608. King Lear. Later quarto in 1619. (Title-page date, 
1608.) 

1608. Pericles. Later quartos in 1609, 1611, and 1619. 

1609. Troilus and Cressida. A second quarto in 1609, 
1622. Othello. 

These are all the known quartos of Shakespeare's 
plays printed before the Folio. They represent two 
distinct classes. The first class (comprising fourteen 
texts) of the quartos contains good texts of the plays 
and is of great assistance to editors. The second 
(comprising five texts), the first Homeo and Juliet, 
Henry F, Merry Wives, the first Hamlet, and Pericles, 



118 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

is composed of thoroughly bad copies. Two of this 
class were not entered on the Stationers' Register at 
all, but were pure piracies. Two others were entered 
by one firm, but were printed by another. The fifth 
was entered and transferred on the same day. Of the 
fourteen good texts, twelve were regularly entered on 
the Stationers' Register, and the other two were evi- 
dently intended to take the place of a bad text. It is 
evident, therefore, that registry upon the books of the 
Stationers' Company was a safeguard to an author in 
getting before the public a good text of his writings. 
It also indicates that the good copies were obtained 
by printers in a legal manner, and so probably pur- 
chased directly from the theaters, whether from the 
copy which the prompter had, or from some transcript 
of the play. The notion that all plays were printed 
in Shakespeare's time by a process of piracy is thus 
not borne out by these facts. 

The five bad quartos deserve a moment's attention. 
The first of these, Romeo and Juliet, printed and pub- 
lished by John Danter in 1597, omits over seven 
hundred lines of the play, and the stage directions are 
descriptions rather than definite instructions. The 
book is printed in two kinds of type, a fact due prob- 
ably to its being printed from two presses at once. 
Danter got into trouble later on with other books from 
his dishonest ways. The second poor quarto, Henry V, 
printed in 1600, was less than half as long as the Folio 
text, and was probably carelessly copied by an igno- 
rant person at a performance of the play. The third, 
the Merry Wives of Windsor, was pirated through the 
publisher of Henry F, John Busby, who assigned his 



HOW SHAKESPEARE GOT INTO PRINT 119 

part to another printer on the same day. As in the 
case of Romeo and Juliet, the stage directions are mere 
descriptions. No play of Shakespeare's was more 
cruelly bungled by an unscrupulous copyist. The first 
edition of Hamlet in 1603 was the work of Valentine 
Sims. While the copying is full of blunders, this 
quarto is considered important, as indicating that the 
play was acted at first in a much shorter and less ar- 
tistic version than the one which we now read. For 
eight months of 1603-1604 the theaters of London were 
closed on account of the plague, and Shakespeare's 
revision of Hamlet may have been made during this 
time. At any rate, the later version appeared about 
the end of 1604. The last of these pirated quartos, 
Pericles, was probably taken down in shorthand at the 
theater. Here, unfortunately, as this play was not 
included in the First Folio, and as all later quartos 
were based on the First Quarto, we have to-day what 
is really a corrupt and difficult text. Luckily, Shake- 
speare's share in this play is small. 

The title-pages of the quartos of Shakespeare bear 
convincing testimony, not only to the genuineness of his 
plays, but also to his rise in reputation. Only six of 
his plays were printed in quartos not bearing his name. 
Of these, two — Romeo and Juliet and Henry V — 
began with pirated editions not bearing the author's 
name. Three — Richard II, Richard III, I Henry IV — 
were all followed by quartos with the poet's name upon 
them. The sixth play, Titus Andronicus, was one of 
his earliest works, and its authorship is even now not 
absolutely certain. 

Since the name of a popular dramatist on the title- 



120 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

page was a distinct source of revenue to the publisher 
after 1598, it was to be expected that anonymous plays 
should be ascribed in some cases to William Shake- 
speare by an unscrupulous or a misinformed printer. 
Here arose the Shakespeare * apocrypha/ which is 
discussed in a following chapter. 

A new problem in the history of Shakespearean 
quartos has been presented since 1903 by a study of 
the quartos of 1619. Briefly summarized, the theory 
which is best defended at the present time is, that in 
that year Thomas Pavier and William Jaggard, two 
printers of London, decided at first to get up a col- 
lected quarto edition of Shakespeare's plays, but on 
giving up this idea, they issued nine plays in a uni- 
form size and on paper bearing identical watermarks, 
which were either at that time or later bound up to- 
gether as a collected set of Shakespeare's plays in a 
single volume.^ These plays are the Whole Contention 
Between the Two Famous Houses of Lancaster and Yorkf 
"printed for T. P."; A Yorkshire Tragedie, "printed 
forT. P., 1619";"PencZes, " printed for T. P. 1619"; 
Merry Wives, " printed for Arthur Johnson, 1619 " ; 
Sir John Oldcastle, " printed for T. P., 1600 " ; Henry F, 
"printed for T. P., 1608"; Merchant of Venice, 
"printed by J. Roberts, 1600"; King Lear, "printed 
for Nathaniel Butter, 1608 " ; Midsummer Nighfs 
Dream, " printed for Thomas Fisher, 1600." 

Of these plays, the Whole Contention, the Yorkshire 

1 This view of the Pavier- Jaggard collection is held by A. W. 
Pollard of the British Museum and W. W. Greg of Trinity College 
Library, Cambridge. The writers of this volume incline to accord 
it complete recognition. 



HOW SHAKESPEARE GOT INTO PRINT 121 

Tragedie, and Sir John Oldcastle are spurious, but 
had been attributed to Shakespeare in earlier quartos. 
The five plays dated 1600 or 1608 in each case dupli- 
cated a quarto actually printed in the year claimed by 
the Pavier reprint ; so that this earlier dating was an 
attempt to deceive the public into believing they were 
purchasing the original editions. 

Under the date of the 8th of November, 1623, 
Edward Blount and Isaac Jaggard entered for theix 
copy in the Stationers' Register " Mr. William Shak- 
speers Comedyes, Histories and Tragedy es, soe mani<5 
of the said copyes as are not formerly entred to other 
men viz*, Comedyes, The Tempest. The two gentle- 
men of Verona. Measure for Measure. The Comedy 
of Errors. As you like it. All's well that ends well. 
Twelfth Night. The winter's tale. Histories The 
third parte of Henry the sixth. Henry the eight. 
Tragedies. Coriolanus. Timon of Athens. Julius 
Caesar. Mackbeth. Anthonie and Cleopatra. Cym- 
beline." This entry preluded the publication of the 
First Folio. Associated with Blount and Jaggard 
were Jaggard' s son Isaac, who had the contract for 
the printing of the book, I. Smethwick, and W. A. 
Aspley. Smethwick owned at this time the rights of 
Love's Labour's Lost, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet, 
and also the Taming of a Shrew, which latter right 
apparently carried with it the right to print Shake- 
speare's adaptation of it, the Taming of the Shrew. 
Aspley owned the rights to Much Ado About Nothing, 
and to II Henry IV . These four printers, making 
arrangements with other printers, such as Law, who 
apparently had the rights of / Henry IV, Richard II, 



122 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

and Richard III, and others, were thus able to bring 
out an apparently complete edition of Shakespeare's 
plays. One play, Troilus and Cressida, was evidently 
secured only at the last moment and printed very irregu- 
larly.^ Blount and Jaggard apparently got the manu- 
scripts of the sixteen plays on the Register from 
members of Shakespeare's company, two of whom, John 
Hemings and Henry Condell, affixed their names to the 
Address to the Reader which was prefixed to the vol- 
ume. It will be remembered that these men received by 
Shakespeare's bequest a gold ring as a token of friend- 
ship. Their intimacy with the dramatist must have 
been both strong and lasting. Their actual share in the 
editing of the volume cannot be ascertained. It may 
be that all the claims are true which are made above 
their names in the Address to the Reader as to their 
care and pains in collecting and publishing his works 
" so to have publish'd them as where before you were 
abused with diverse stolne and surreptitious copies, 
maimed and deformed, the stealthes of injurious copy- 
ists, we expos'd them ; even those are now offer'd to 
your view, crude and bereft of their limbes, and of 
the rest absolutely in their parts as he conceived them 
who as he was a happie imitator of nature was a most 
gentle expresser of it. His mind and hand went 
together and what he thought he told with that 
easinesse that wee have scarse received from him a 

1 It was evidently designed to fit in between Romeo and Juliet 
and Julius Csesar ; but the owner of the publishing rights holding 
out till that part of the book was ready, the editors " ran in " 
Timon of Athens to fill up. When Troilus and Cressida was finally 
arranged for, it had to be inserted between the Histories and 
Tragedies. 



HOW SHAKESPEARE GOT INTO PRINT 123 

blot in his papers.^' On the other hand, scholarship 
has discovered more in the life of Edward Blount to 
justify his claim to the chief work of editing this 
volume. Whoever they were, the editors' claim to dil- 
igent care in their work was sincere. Throughout the 
volume there are proofs that they employed the best 
text which they could get, even when others were in 
print. 

It is owing to this volume, in all probability, that we 
possess twenty of the best of Shakespeare's plays and 
the best texts of a number of the others. We are there- 
fore glad to hear that the edition was a success and was 
considered worth reprinting within nine years. It is 
not improbable that this edition ran to five hundred 
copies. Among the most interesting work of the 
editors of the volume was the prefixing of the Droes- 
hout engraved portrait on the title-page, and an at- 
tempt to improve the stage directions, as well as the 
division of most of the plays, either in whole or in 
part, into acts and scenes. 

The twenty plays which appeared in print for the 
first time in the First Folio were taken in all probabil- 
ity directly from copies in the possession of Shake- 
speare's company. Their texts are, upon the whole, 
excellent. In the case of the sixteen other plays 
the editors substituted for eight of the plays already 
in print in quartos, independent texts from better 
manuscripts. This act must have involved consider- 
able expense and difiiculty, and deserves the highest 
praise. Five of the printed quartos were used with 
additions and corrections. In the case of Titus An- 
dronicus a whole scene was added. In three cases only 



124 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

of the sixteen plays already printed did the editors 
follow a quarto text without correcting it from a later 
theatrical copy. This conscientious effort to give 
posterity the best text of. Shakespeare deserves our 
gratitude. 

The Second Folio, 1632, was a reprint of the First ; 
the Third Folio, 1663, a reprint of the Second ; the 
Fourth Folio, 1685, a reprint of the Third. This prac- 
tice of copying the latest accessible edition has been 
adopted by editors down to a very late period. Be- 
tween 1629 and 1632 six quartos of Shakespearean 
plays were printed, — a fact which indicates that the 
First Folio edition had been exhausted and that there 
was a continued market. A man named Thomas Cotes 
acquired through one Richard Cotes the printing 
rights of the Jaggards, and added to them other rights 
derived from Pavier. The old publishers, Smethwick 
and Aspley, were still living and were associated with 
him in publishing the Second Folio. Robert Allott, 
June 26, 1629, had bought up Blount's title to the plays 
first registered in 1623, and was thus also concerned 
in the publication, while Richard Hawkins and Richard 
Meighen, who owned the rights of Othello and Merry 
Wives, were allowed to take shares. The editors of 
the Second Folio made only such alterations in the 
text of the First Folio as they thought necessary to 
make it more "correct." The vast majority of the 
changes are unimportant grammatical corrections, 
some of them obviously right, others as obviously 
wrong. 

Five more Shakespearean quartos followed between 
1634 and 1639. Between 1652 and 1655 two other 



HOW SHAKESPEARE GOT INTO PRINT 125 

quartos were published. The Third Folio, 1664, was 
published by Philip Chetwind, who had married the 
widow of Robert Allott and thus got most of the rights 
in the Second Folio. Chetwind's Folio is famous, not 
only for the addition of Pericles, which alone it was 
his first intention to include, but also for the addition 
of six spurious plays — Sir John Oldcastle, The York- 
shire Tragedie, A London Prodigall, TJie Tragedie of 
Locrine, Thomas, Lord Cromwell, and The Puritaine, 
or The Widdow of Watling Streete. Chetwind's rea- 
son for thus adding these plays was that they had 
passed under Shakespeare's name or initials in their 
earliest prints. The Fourth Folio, 1685, is a mere re- 
print of the Third. 

With the Fourth Folio ends the early history of how 
Shakespeare got into print. From that time to this a 
long line of famous and obscure men, at first mostly 
men of letters, but afterwards, and especially in our 
own times, trained specialists in their profession, have 
devoted much of their lives to the editing of Shake- 
speare. Their ideal has been, usually, to give readers 
the text of his poems and plays in their presumed 
primitive integrity. Constant study of his works, and 
of other Elizabethan writers, has given them a certain 
knowledge of the words and grammatical usages of 
that day which go far to make Elizabethan English a 
foreign tongue to us. On the other hand, more knowl- 
edge about the conditions of printing in Shakespeare's 
time has helped the editors very greatly in their at- 
tempts to set right a passage which was misprintea 
in the earliest printed text, or a line of which two 
early texts give different versions. 



126 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

An example of the difficulties that still confront 
editors may be given from II Henry IV, IV, i, 94-96:— 

^^ Archbishop. My brother general, the commonwealth, 
To brother born, an household cruelty. 
I make my quarrel in particular.'* 

Nobody knows what Shakespeare meant to say in this 
passage, and no satisfactory guess has ever been made 
as to what has happened to these lines. 

A knowledge of Elizabethan English has cleared up 
the following passage perfectly. According to the 
First Folio, the only early print, Antony calls Lepidus, 
in Julius Ccesar, IV, i, 36-37 : — 

"A barren-spirited fellow ; one that feeds 
On objects, arts, and imitations. ..." 

This has been corrected to read in the second line 

*' On abjects, orts, and imitations." 

Abjects here means outcasts, and orts, scraps, or leav- 
ings ; but no one unfamiliar with the language of that 
time could have solved the puzzle. 

A different sort of problem is offered by such plays 
as King Lear, of which the quartos furnish three hun- 
dred lines not in the Folio, while the Folio has one 
hundred lines not in the quartos, and is, on the whole, 
much more carefully copied. The modern editor gives 
all the lines in both versions, so that we read a King 
Lear which is probably longer than Shakespeare's 
countrymen read or ever saw acted. The modern ed- 
itor selects, however, when Folio and quartos differ, 
the reading which seems best. 



HOW SHAKESPEARE GOT INTO PRINT 127 

Folio. " Cordelia. "Was this a face 

To be opposed against the jarring winds ? " 

Quartos. " Was this a face 

To be opposed against the warring winds ? " 

In such a difference as this, the personal taste of 
the editor is apt to govern his text. 

We cannot here go farther in explaining the problems 
of the Shakespeare text. To those who would know 
more of them, the Variorum edition of Dr. H. H. 
Furness offers a full history. In the light of the 
knowledge which he and other scholars have thrown 
upon textual criticism, it is unlikely that there will 
ever be poor texts of Shakespeare reprinted. The 
work of the Shakespeare scholars has not been in 
vain. 

Later Editions. — Nicholas Rowe in 1709 produced the first 
edition in the modern sense. He modernized the spelling 
frankly, repunctuated, corrected the grammar, made out lists 
of the dramatis personse, arranged the verse which was in dis- 
order, and made a number of good emendations in difficult 
places. He added also exits and entrances, which in earlier 
prints were only inserted occasionally. Further, he completed 
the division of the plays into acts and scenes. Perhaps his 
most important work was writing a full life of Shakespeare in 
which several valuable traditions are preserved. The poems 
were not included in the edition, but were published in 1715 
from the edition of 1640. He followed the Third and Fourth 
Folios in reprinting the spurious plays. The edition was re- 
printed in 1714, 1725, and 1728. 

In 1725 Alexander Pope published his famous edition of 
Shakespeare. Pope possessed a splendid lot of the old quartos 
and the first two folios, but his edition was wantonly careless. 
He did, indeed, use some sense in excluding the seven spurious 
plays as well as Pericles from his edition, and he undoubtedly 



128 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

worked hard on the text. He subdivided the scenes more 
minutely than Rowe after the fashion of the French stage divi- 
sion, — where a new scene begins with every new character in- 
stead of after the stage has been cleared. Pope's explanations of 
the words which appeared difficult in Shakespeare's text were 
often laughably far from the truth. The word ' foison,' mean- 
ing 'plenty,' Pope defined as the ' natural juice of grass.' The 
word 'neif,' meaning 'fist,' Pope thought meant 'woman.* 
Pistol is thus made to say, " Thy woman will I take." Phrases 
that appeared to be vulgar or unpoetical he simply dropped out, 
or altered without notice. He rearranged the lines in order to 
give them the studied smoothness characteristic of the eigh- 
teenth century. In fact, he tried to make Shakespeare as near 
like Pope's poetry as he could. 

In 1726 Lewis Theobald published Shakespeare Bestored, 
with many corrections of Pope's errors. In this little pam- 
phlet most of the material was devoted to Hamlet. Theobald's 
corrections were taken by Pope in very bad part ; and the lat- 
ter tried to destroy Theobald's reputation by writing satires 
against him and by injuring him in every possible way in print. 
The first of these publications. The Dunciad, appeared in 1728 ; 
and this, the greatest satire in the English language, was so 
effective as to have obscured Theobald's real merit until our 
own day. Theobald's edition of Shakespeare followed in 1734, 
and was reprinted in 1740. It is famous for his corrections and 
improvements of the text, many of which are followed by all 
later editors of Shakespeare. The most notable of these is 
Mrs. Quickly's remark in Falstaff's deathbed scene, " His nose 
was as sharp as a pen and a' babbled of green fields." The 
previous texts had given "and a table of green fields." Pope 
had said that this nonsense crept in from the name of the prop- 
erty man who was named Greenfield, and thus there must have 
been a stage direction here, — "Bring in a table of Greenfield's." 

Theobald's edition was followed in 1744 by Thomes Hanmer's 
edition in six volumes. Hanmer was a country gentleman, but 
not much of a scholar. 

Warburton's edition followed in 1747. In 1765 appeared 



HOW SHAKESPEARE GOT INTO PRINT 12^ 

Samuel Johnson's long-delayed edition in eight volumes. Aside 
from a few common-sense explanations, the edition is not of 
much merit. 

Tyrwhitt's edition in 1766 was followed by a reprint of twenty 
of the early quartos by George Steevens in the same year. Two 
years later came the edition of Edward Capell, the greatest 
scholarly work since Theobald's. In this edition was the first 
rigorous comparison between the readings of the folios and the 
quartos. His quartos, now in the British Museum, are of the 
greatest value to Shakespeare scholars. With his edition begins 
the tendency to get back to the earliest form of the text and not 
to try to improve Shakespeare to the ideal of what the editor 
thinks Shakespeare should have said. 

In 1773 Johnson's edition was revised by Steevens, and Per- 
icles was readmitted. This was a valuable but crotchety edi- 
tion. In 1790 Edmund Malone published his famous edition 
in ten volumes. No Shakespearean scholar ranks higher than 
he in reputation. Numerous editions followed up to 1855, of 
which the most important is James Boswell's so-called Third 
Variorum in twenty-one volumes. In 1855-1861 was published 
J. O. Halli well's edition in fifteen volumes, which contains enor- 
mous masses of antiquarian material. 

In 1853 appeared the forgeries of J. P. Collier, to which ref- 
erence is made elsewhere. 

In 1854-1861 appeared the edition in Germany of N. Delius. 
The Leopold Shakespeare, 1876, used Delius's text. 

In 1857-1865 appeared the first good American edition of R. G. 
White. It contained many original suggestions. Between 1863 
and 1866 appeared the edition of Clark and Wright, known as 
the Cambridge edition. Mr. W. Aldis Wright, now the dean 
of living Shakespearean scholars, is chiefly responsible for this 
text. It was reprinted with a few changes into the Globe edition, 
and is stiil the chief popular text. 

Prof., W. A. Neilson's single volume in the Cambridge series, 
1906, is the latest scholarly edition in America. It follows in 
most cases the positions taken by Clark and Wright. 

Within the last few years there has been an enormous stimu- 



130 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

lus to Shakespeare study. The chief work of modern Shake- 
spearean scholarship is the still incomplete Vai'iorum edition of 
Dr. H. H. Furness and his son. 

Other aids to study are reprints of the books used by Shake- 
speare, facsimile reprints of the original quartos of the plays, 
and, perhaps as useful as any one thing, the facsimile reproduc- 
tion of the First Folio. The few perplexing problems that the 
scholar still finds in the text of Shakespeare will probably never 
be solved. 

On the subject of this chapter, consult A. W. Pollard, Shake- 
speare Folios and Quartos^ Methuen, London, 1910; Sidney Lee, 
Introduction to the facsimile reproduction of the First Folio by 
the Oxford University Press ; T. R. Lounsbury, The Text of 
Shakespeare, New York, Scribners, 1906. For the remarks of 
critics and editors, the Variorum edition of Dr. H. H. Furness 
is invaluable. 



CHAPTER X 

THE PLAYS OF THE FIRST PERIOD IMITATION AND 

EXPERIMENT 

1587 (?)-1594 

The first period of Shakespeare's work carries him 
from the youthful efforts at dramatic construction to 
such mastery of dramatic technique and of original 
portrayal of life as raise him, when aided by his su- 
preme poetic art, above all other living dramatists. It 
was chiefly a period in which the young poet, full of 
ambition, .curious of his own talents, and eager for 
success, was feeling his way among the different types 
of drama which he saw reaching success on the London 
stage. 

The longest period of experiment was in the writing 
of chronicle histories. The experience acquired in 
these six plays, all derived in some measure from earlier 
work by others, made Shakespeare a master of this 
type. Next in importance was comedy, chiefly romantic, 
with four pluys of widely different aim and merit. 
These two types are brought to the highest develop- 
ment in the dramatist's second period. Tragedy was 
to wait for a fuller and riper experience. What the 
complete earlier version of Romeo and Juliet was like, 
we have only a faint idea ; it was obviously, while in- 

131 



132 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

tensely appealing, the work of a young and immature 
poet. Titus Andronicus led nowhere in development. 

Christopher Marlowe remained Shakespeare's master 
in the drama throughout the chronicle plays of the 
period. John Lyly's court comedies contained most of 
the types of character which are to be found in Lovers 
Labour's Lost. Throughout the period Shakespeare 
grows in mastery of plot and of his dramatic verse; 
but his chief growth is away from this imitation of 
others into his own creative portraiture of character. 
The growth from the bluff soldier, Talbot, in Henry 
F/ to the weak but appealing Richard II is no less 
marked than is that from the fantastic Armado in 
Lovers Labour's Lost to the unconsciously ridiculous 
Bottom. 

Shakespeare's greatest achievements in this period, 
aside from Borneo and Juliet in the unknown first draft, 
are the characters of Richard II and Richard III, the 
former a portrait of vanity and vacillation mingled with 
more agreeable traits, lovable gentleness and traces at 
least of kingliness, the latter a Titanic figure possessed 
by an overmastering passion. 

It is impossible to draw a satisfactory line of 
division between the experimental period of Shake- 
speare's work and the period of comedy which follows. 
Two plays, A Midsummer NigMs Dream and The Mer- 
chant of Venice, lie really between the two. The chiof 
arguments for an early grouping seem to be that the 
former is in some measure an artificial court comedy, 
and is full of riming speech and end-stopped lines; 
the latter derives some help from Marlowe's treatment 
of The Jew of Malta. But, on the other hand, the 



THE PLAYS OF THE FIRST PERIOD 133 

mastery of original characterization in sucli groups as 
the deli ate fairies of the Dream, or those who gather 
at the trial of The Merchant, might justify their posi- 
tion in the second period rather than in the first. On 
the whole, it is perhaps wisest to let metrical differences 
govern, and so to put Midsummer Night's Dream at the 
end of Imitati' n and Experiment; while The Merchant 
of Venice may safely usher in the great period of 
comedy. 

The three plays known as The Three Parts of Henry 
VI, together with Richard the Third, constitute the 
history of the Wars of the Roses, in which the House 
of York fought the House of Lancaster through the 
best part of the fifteenth century, and lost the fight and 
the English crown in 1485, a hundred years before 
Shakespeare came to London. Although these plays 
have but slight appeal to us as readers, they must have 
been highly popular among Elizabethan playgoers. 

The First Part of Henry the Sixth deals chiefly with 
the wars of Engla,nd and France which center about 
the figures of Talbot, the English commander, and Joan 
of Arc, called Joan la Pucelle (the maiden). The 
former is a hero of battle, who dies fighting for Eng- 
land. The latter is painted according to the traditional 
English view, which lasted long after Shakespeare's 
time, as a wicked and impure woman, in league with 
devils, who fight for her against the righteous power 
of England. We are glad to think that while the 
Talbot scenes are probably Shakespeare's, the portrait 
of La Pucelle is not from his hand, as we shall see. 
The deaths of these protagonists prepares the way for 
the peace which Suffolk concludes, and the marriage 



134 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

which he arranges between Margaret of Anjou and 
King Henry. 

The Second Part of Henry the Sixth concerns the out- 
break of strife between York and Lancaster, but chiefly 
the overthrow of the uncle of the king, Duke Humphrey 
of Gloucester, as Protector of the Realm, and the de- 
struction of his opponent, the Duke of Suffolk, in his 
turn. The play ends with the first battle of St. Albans 
(1455), resulting in the complete triumph of Duke 
Richard of York, in open rebellion against King 
Henry. 

The Third Part of King Henry the Sixth tells of the 
further wars of York and Lancaster, in the course of 
which Richard of York is murdered, and his sons, 
Edward and Richard, keep up the struggle, while War- 
wick, styled the " Kingmaker," transfers his power to 
Lancaster. In the end York is triumphant ; and while 
Henry VI and his son are murdered, and Warwick 
slain in battle at Barnet, Edward is crowned as Ed- 
ward IV, and Richard becomes the Duke of Gloucester. 

Authorship. — The Three Parts of Henry the Sixth were first 
printed in the Pirst Folio, 1623. Two earlier plays, The First 
Part of the Contention between the two Noble Houses of York 
and Lancaster (sometimes called 1 Contention)^ and The True 
Tragedy of Bichard, Duke of York . . . with the whole Conten- 
tion between the two Houses of Lancaster and York (2 Conten- 
tion), appeared in quarto in 1594 and 1595 respectively. These 
are to be regarded as earlier versions of II and /// Henry VIA 
For the First Part of Henry VI no dramatic source exists. 
The ultimate source is, of course, Holinshed's Chronicles. 

The authorship of these plays is not ascribed to any dramatist, 
until 1623, although, as we have seen,^ Robert Greene accuses 

1 Schelling, Elizabethan Drama I, 264. 2 gee p. 8. 



THE PLAYS OF THE FIRST PERIOD 135 

Shakespeare of authorship in a stolen play, by applying to him 
a line from III Henry VI which had appeared earlier in 2 Con- 
tention. Internal study of the three plays, however, has reduced 
the problem to about this state : — 

The First Fart of Henry VI is thought to have been written 
by Greene, with George Peele and Marlowe to help. To this 
Shakespeare was allowed to add a few scenes on a later revival 
of the play. Some critics give to him the Talbot scenes and the 
quarrel in the Temple ; but Professor Neilson warns us that the 
grounds for this and other assignments of authorship in the 
play " are in the highest degree precarious." 

The two Contentions are thought to have been chiefly the work 
of Marlowe, with Greene to help him. Others are suggested as 
assistants, such as Lodge, Peele, and Shakespeare. In the re- 
vival of the two Contentions^ Shakespeare's work amounted to a 
close revision, though the older material remained in larger 
part, both in text and plot. In this revision, Marlowe is thought 
to have aided, and Greene's bitter attack on Shakespeare may 
have been caused by the fact that Shakespeare had so supplanted 
him as collaborator with Marlowe, then the greatest dramatist 
of England. It hardly seems likely that this attack would have 
been made if Shakespeare had had any share in the first ver- 
sions, The Contentions. 

Date. — The First Part of Henry VI is thought to have been 
the play at the Rose Theatre on March 3, 1591-1592, by Lord 
Strange's company, since a reference by Nash about this time 
refers to Talbot as a stage figure. The Second and Third 
Parts have no evidence other than that of style, but are usu- 
ally assigned to the period 1590-1592. 

Richard the Third is best treated at this point, although 
in the date of composition King John may intervene 
between it and III Henry VI. It is the tale of a tyrant, 
who, by murdering everybody who stands in his way, 
including his two nephews, his brother, and his friend, 
wins the crown of England, only to be swept by irresist- 



136 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

ible popular wrath, into ruin and death on Bosworth 
Field. This tyrant is scarcely human, but rather the 
impersonation of a great passion of ambition. In 
this respect, as well as in lack of humor, lack of develop- 
ment of character, and in other ways less easy to grasp, 
Shakespeare is here distinctly imitative of Marlowe's 
method in plays like Tamhurlaine. 

Date. — Bichard the Third was very popular among Eliza- 
bethans, for quartos appeared in 1597, 1598 (then first ascribed to 
Shakespeare), 1602, 1605, 1612, 1629, 1622, and 1634. The Eirst 
Eolio version is quite different in detail from the Quarto, and 
is thought to have been a good copy of an acting version. The 
date of writing can hardly be later than 1593. 

Source. — An anonymous play called The True Tragedie of 
Bichard ///had appeared before Shakespeare's; just when is un- 
certain. A still earlier play, a tragedy in Latin called Bichardus 
Tertius, also told the story. Shakespeare's chief source was, 
however, Holinshed's Chronicles, which learned the tradition of 
Richard's wickedness from a life of that king written in Henry 
VII's time, and ascribed to Sir Thomas More. In the Chron- 
icles was but a bare outline of the character which the dramatist 
so powerfully developed. 

King John, so far as its central theme may be said to 
exist, portrays the ineffectual struggles of a crafty and 
unscrupulous coward to stick to England's slippery 
throne. At first King John is successful. Bribed 
with the rich dowry of Blanch, niece of England, as a 
bride for his son the Dauphin, King Philip of France 
ceases his war upon England in behalf of Prince 
Arthur, John's nephew and rival. When the Church 
turns against John for his refusal to obey the Pope, and 
Prance and Austria continue the war, John is victorious, 
and captures Prince Arthur. At this point begins his 



THE PLAYS OF THE FIRST PERIOD 137 

downfall. His cruel treatment of the young prince, 
while not actually ending in the murder he had planned, 
drives the boy to attempted escape and to death. The 
nobles rise and welcome the Dauphin, whose invasion 
of England proves fruitless, it is true, but the victory 
is not won by John, and the king dies ignobly at 
Swinstead Abbey. 

Two characters rise above the rest in this drama 
of unworthy schemes, — Constance, the passionately 
devoted mother of Prince Arthur, who fights for her 
son with almost tigress-like ferocity, and Faulcon- 
bridge, the loyal lieutenant of King John, cynical and 
fond of bragging, but brave and patriotic, and gifted 
with a saving grace of rough humor, much needed in 
the sordid atmosphere he breathes. One single scene 
contains a note of pathos otherwise foreign to the 
play, — that in which John's emissary Hubert begins 
his cruel task of blinding poor Prince Arthur, but 
yields to pity and forbears. 

Date. — The Troublesome Baigne was published in 1591, and 
probably written about that time. Shakespeare's play did not 
appear in print until the First Folio, 1623. Meres mentions it, 
however, in 1698, and internal evidence of meter and style, as 
well as of dramatic structure, puts the play betv/een Bichard 
III and Bichard II, or at any rate close to them. The three 
plays have been arranged in every order by critics of authority. 
Perhaps 1592-1593 is a safe date. 

Source. — The only source was the two parts of The Trouble- 
some Baigne of John, King of England, a play which appeared 
anonymously in quarto in 1591. Shakespeare compressed the 
two parts into one, gaining obvious advantages thereby, but 
losing also some incidents without which the later play is 
unmotivated. The hatred felt by Faulconbridge for Austria 
was due in the earlier version to the legendary belief that 



138 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

Richard Coeur-de-Lion, his father, met death at Austria's handa 
No reference to this is made by Shakespeare, but the hatred 
remains as a motive. In the opening scene between the Bastard 
and his mother, Shakespeare's condensation has injured the 
story somewhat. But most of his clianges are improvements. 
He cut out the pandering to religious prejudice which in the 
earlier play made John a Protestant hero to suit Elizabethan 
opinion. He improved the exits and entrances, divided the 
scenes in more effective ways, and built up the element of comic 
relief in Faulconbridge's red-blooded humor. 

The numerous alterations from historical fact, such as the 
youth of Arthur, the widowhood of Constance, the character 
of Faulconbridge, are all from the earlier version, as is the 
suppression of the baron's wars and Magna Charta. Shake- 
speare added practically nothing to the action in his source. 

A still earlier play, Kynge Johan by Bishop John Bale 
(c. 1550), had nothing to do with later versions. 

Richard the Second, unlike Richard the Tliird, is 
not simply the story of one man. While Richard III 
is on the stage during more than two-thirds of the 
latter play, Richard II appears during almost exactly 
half of the action. Richard III dominates his play 
throughout ; Richard II in only two or three scenes. 
Richard's two uncles, John of Gaunt and the Duke of 
York, and his two cousins, Hereford (Bolingbroke, 
later Henry IV) and Aumerle, claim almost as much 
of our attention as does the central figure of the play, 
the light, vain, and thoughtless king. 

And yet with all this improvement in the adjust- 
ment of the leading role to the whole picture, Shake- 
speare drew a far more real and complete character in 
Richard II than any he had yet portrayed in historical 
drama. It is a character seen in many lights. At 
first we are disappointed with Richard's love of the 



THE PLAYS OF THE FIRST PERIOD 139 

spectacular when he allows Bolingbroke's challenge 
to Mowbray to go as far as the actual sounding of the 
trumpets in the lists before he casts down his warder 
and decrees the banishment of both. A little later we 
see with disgust his greedy thoughtlessness, when he 
insults the last hour of John of Gaunt by his importu- 
nate visit, and without a word of regret lays hold of 
his dead uncle's property to help on his own Irish 
wars. Nor does our respect for him rise at all when 
in the critical moment, upon the return of Bolingbroke 
to England, Richard's weak will vacillates between 
action and unmanly lament, and all the while his 
vanity delights to paint his misery in full-mouth'd 
rhetoric. Vanity is again the note of his abdication, 
when he calls for a mirror in which to behold the 
face that has borne such sorrow as his, and then in a 
fit of almost childish rage dashes the glass upon the 
ground. His whole life, like that one act, has been 
impulsive and futile. 

But now that misfortune and degradation have 
come upon King Richard, Shakespeare compels us 
to turn from disgust to pity, and finally almost to 
admiration. We realize that after all Richard is a 
king, and that his wretched state demands compas- 
sion. Moreover, a nobler side of Richard's character 
is portrayed. His deeply touching farewell to his 
loving Queen, as he goes to his solitary confinement, 
though tinged with almost unmanly meekness of 
spirit, is yet poignant with true grief. And the last 
scene of all, in which he dies, vainly yet bravely resist- 
ing his murderers, is a gallant end to a life so full of 
indecision. 



140 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

In strong contrast with this weak and still absorbing 
figure are the two high-minded and patriotic uncles 
of King Richard, and the masterful though unscrupu- 
lous Henry. The famous prophetic speech of dying 
John of Gaunt is committed to memory by every 
English schoolboy, as the expression of the highest 
patriotism in the noblest poetry. And just as our 
attitude towards Richard changes from contempt to 
pity and even admiration, so our admiration for 
Henry, the man of action and, as he calls himself, 
" the true-borne Englishman," turns into indignation 
at his usurpation of the throne and his connivance, 
to use no stronger term, at the murder of his sovereign. 
Throughout the play, however, Shakespeare makes 
us feel that the national cause demands Henry's 
triumph. 

Date. — Marlowe's Edward II is usually dated 1593 ; and 
Shakespeare's Richard II is dated the year following, in order 
to accommodate facts to theory. The frequency of rime points 
to an earlier date, the absence of prose to a later date. Our 
only certain date is 1597, when a quarto appeared. Others fol- 
lowed in 1598, 1608, and 1615. 

A play " of the deposing of Richard II" was performed by 
wish of the Earl of Essex in London streets in 1601, on the eve 
of his attempted revolt against the queen. If this was our play, 
then Essex failed as signally in understanding the real theme of 
the play as he did in interpreting the attitude of Englishmen 
toward him. Both the one and the other condemned usurpa- 
tion in the strongest terms. 

Source. — Holinshed's Chronicles furnished Shakespeare with 
but the bare historical outline. It is usual to suggest that Mar- 
lowe's portrayal of a similarly weak figure with a similarly 
tragic end suggested Shakespeare's play ; and this may be, 
though there is nothing to indicate direct influence. 



THE PLAYS OF THE FIRST PERIOD 141 

Titus Andronicus has a plot so revolting to modern 
readers that many critics like to follow the seven- 
teenth-century tradition, which tells, according to a 
writer who wanted to justify his own tinkering, that 
Shakespeare added " some master-touches to one or 
two of the principal characters," and nothing more. 
But unfortunately not only the phraseology and the 
meter, but the more important external evidences 
point to Shakespeare, and, however we might wish it, 
we cannot find grounds to dismiss the theory that 
Shakespeare was at least responsible for the rewriting 
of an older play. 

No play better deserves the type name of * tragedy 
of blood.' The crimes which disfigure its scenes 
seem to us unnecessarily wanton. Briefly, the struggle 
is between Titus, conqueror of the Goths, and Tamora, 
their captive queen, who marries the Roman emperor, 
and who would revenge Titus's sacrifice of her son to 
the shades of his own slain sons. From the first five 
minutes, during which a noble Goth is hacked to 
pieces — off stage, mercifully — to the last minute of 
carnage, when the entire company go hands all round 
in murder, fifteen persons are slain, and other crimes 
no less horrible perpetrated. Every one at some time 
gets his revenge ; and the play is entirely made up of 
plotting, killing, gloating, and counterplotting. The 
inhumanly brutal Aaron, the blackamoor lover of 
Tamora, is arch villain in all this; but the ungovern- 
able passions of Titus render him scarcely more at- 
tractive. 

The pity of it is that the young Shakespeare ap- 
parently wasted upon this slaughtering much genuine 



142 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

poetic art, and no little elaboration of plot. But he 
was writing what the public of that day enjoyed. 
Developed by such real artists as Kyd, the tragedy of 
blood, like the modern " thriller," had about 1590 an 
enormous success. It is well for us to remember, too, 
that out of one of these tragedies of revenge and blood 
sprang the great tragedy of Hamlet. 

Date. — The most recent authorities put the play as written 
not long before the publication of the First Quarto, 1594. The 
Stationers' Register records it on February 6, 1593-4. Second 
and Third Quartos followed in 1600 and 1611. None of these 
ascribe the play to Shakespeare. It is, however, included in 
the First Folio. 

Authorship and Source. — Richard Henslowe, the manager, re- 
corded in his Diary, April 11, 1591, the performance of a 
new play Tittus and Vespacia. In a German version, Tito 
Andronico, printed in a collection of 1620, Lucius is called 
Vespasian ; and thus we have a slight ground for belief that the 
entry of Henslowe refers to an early play about our Titus. A 
Dutch version, Aran en Titus, appeared in 1641. This ap- 
pears to have been based on another relation of the story, earlier 
and cruder than Shakespeare's. The Shakespearean version 
probably came from these two earlier plays, with considerable 
additions in plot. 

The two latest students of the play. Dr. Fuller and Mr. 
Robertson, differ as far as they well can on the question of au- 
thorship. The former believes Shakespeare wrote every line of 
the present play ; the latter that he wrote none of it, and that 
Greene and Peele had their full share. Kyd and Marlowe are 
assigned as authors by others. One fact stands clear, that in 
the face of the evidence of the First Folio and of Meres, no con- 
clusive internal evidence has disposed of the theory of Shake- 
spearean authorship. The play was enormously popular, if we 
may judge by contemporary references to it, and a mistake in 
attribution by Meres would therefore have been the more re- 



THE PLAYS OF THE FIRST PERIOD 143 

markable. Incredible, too, as it may seem, the earlier versions 
must have been more revolting than Shakespeare's ; so that 
there is really a lift into higher drama. 

Romeo and Juliet stands out from the other great 
tragedies of Shakespeare, not only in point of time, 
but in its central theme. It deals with the power of 
nature in awaking youth to full manhood and woman- 
hood through the sudden coming of pure and supreme 
love ; with the danger which always attends the pre- 
cipitate call of this awakening ; and with the sudden 
storm which overcasts the brilliant day of passion. 
The enmity of the rival houses of Montague and Capu- 
let, to which Romeo and Juliet belong, is but a con- 
crete form of this danger that ever waits when nature 
prompts. Romeo's fancied love for another disap- 
pears like a drop of water on a stone in the sun, when 
his glance meets Juliet's at the Capulet's ball. Love 
takes equally sudden hold of her. Worldly and reli- 
gious caution seek to stem the flood of passion, or at 
least to direct it. The lovers are married at Friar 
Laurence's cell; but in the sudden whirl of events 
that follow the friar's amiable schemes, one slight 
error on his part wastes all that glorious passion and 
youth have won. It was not his fault, after all ; such 
is the eternal tragedy when Youth meets Love, and 
Nature leads them unrestrained to peril. 

In perfection of dramatic technique parts of this 
play rank with the very best of Shakespeare's work. 
When to this is added the extraordinary beauty and 
fire of the poetry, and the brilliancy of color and stage 
picture afforded by the setting in old Verona, it is no 
wonder that to-day no mouthing of the words, no 



144 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

tawdriness of setting, and no wretchedness of acting 
can hinder the supreme appeal of this play to audi- 
ences all over the world. The chief characters are 
well contrasted by the dramatist. Romeo, affecting 
sadness, but in reality merry by nature, becomes 
grave when the realization of love comes upon him. 
Juliet, when love comes, rises gladly to meet its 
full claim. She is the one who plans and dares, 
and Romeo the one who listens. Contrasted with 
Romeo is his friend, Mercutio, gay and daring, loving 
and light-hearted ; contrasted with Juliet is her old 
nurse, devoted, like the family cat, but unscrupulous, 
vain, and worldly, — a great comic figure. 

Date. — There is throughout the play, but chiefly in the 
rimed passages in the earUer parts, a great deal of verbal con- 
ceit and playing upon words, which mark immaturity. The 
use of sonnets in two places, and the abundance of rime, point 
also to early work ; but the dramatic technique and the 
development of character equal the work of later periods. 

The First Quarto is a garbled copy taken down in the theater. 
It was printed in 1597. Its title claims that " it hath been 
often (with great applause) plaid publiquely, by the right 
Honourable the L. of Hunsdon his servants." The company 
in which Shakespeare acted was so called from July, 1596, to 
April, 1597. The Second Quarto, " newly corrected, augmented, 
and amended," appeared in 1599, and is the basis of all later 
texts. Three others followed — 1609, one undated, and 1637. 

It is generally held that Shakespeare wrote much, perhaps 
all, of the play in the early nineties, and that he revised it for 
production about 1597. The play is therefore a stepping-stone 
between the first and second periods of his work. 

Source. — The development of the story has been traced 
from Luigi da Porto's history of Romeo and Giulietta (pr, 1530 
at Venice) through Bandello, Boisteau, and Painter's Palace of 



THE PLAYS OF THE FIRST PERIOD 145 

Pleasure, to Arthur Brooke's poem Bomeus and Juliet (1562), 
and to a lost English play which Brooke says in his address 
" To the Reader" he had seen on the stage, but is now known 
only through a Dutch play of 1630 based upon it. 

The part in which Shakespeare altered the action most 
notably is the first scene, one of the most masterly expositions 
of a dramatic situation ever written. The nurse is borrowed 
from Brooke, the death of Mercutio from the old play. The 
whole is, however, completely transfused by the welding fire of 
genius. 

Love's Labour's Lost. — Obviously imitative of the 
comedies of John Lyly, Love's Labour's Lost is a 
light, pleasant court comedy, vt^ith but a slight thread 
of plot. The king of Navarre and three of his nobles 
forswear for three years the society of ladies in order 
to pursue study. This plan is interrupted by the 
Princess of France, who with three ladies comes on an 
embassy to Navarre. The inevitable happens ; the 
gentlemen fall in love with the ladies, and, after 
ineffectual struggles to keep their oaths, give up the 
pursuit of learning for that of love. This runs on 
merrily enough in courtly fashion till the announce- 
ment of the death of the king of France ends the 
embassy, and the lovers are put on a year's probation 
of constancy. In the subplot, or minor story, the 
play is notable for the burlesquing of two types of 
character — a pompous pedantic schoolmaster, and a 
braggart who always speaks in high-flown metaphor. 
These two, happily contrasted with a country curate, 
a court page, and a country clown with his lass, make 
much good sport. 

It is often said, but as we believe without sufficient 
proof, that the wit combats of the lords and ladies. 



146 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

and the artificial speech of the sonneteering courtiers, 
were also introduced for burlesque. These elements 
appear, hoAvever, in other plays than this, with no 
intention of burlesque ; and it seems probable that 
Shakespeare greatly enjoyed this display of his power 
as a master in the prevailing fashion of courtly rep- 
artee. In this fashion, as well as in the handling 
of the low-comedy figures, and in other ways, Shake- 
speare followed in the steps of John Lyly, the author 
of the novel Euphues and of the seven court comedies 
written in the decade before Lovers Labour's Lost. 
Shakespeare's play, however, far surpasses those 
which it imitated. 

Date. — The date of Lovers Labour'' s Lost is entirely a 
matter of conjecture. It may well have been the very earliest 
of Shakespeare's comedies. Most scholars agree that the 
characteristics of style to which we have referred, together 
with the great use of rime (see p. 81) and the immaturity of the 
play as a whole, must indicate a very early date, and therefore 
put the play not later than 1591. 

A quarto was published in 1598, "newly corrected and aug- 
mented by W. Shakespere." The corrections, from certain 
mistakes of the printer, appear to be in the speeches of the wit- 
tiest of the lords and ladies, Biron and Rosaline. The play 
next appeared in the Folio. 

Source. — No direct source has been discovered. In 1586, 
Catherine de' Medici, accompanied by her ladies, visited the 
court of Henry of Navarre, and attempted to settle the disputes 
between that prince and her son, Henry III. Other hints may 
also have come from French history. The masque of Muscovites 
may have been based on the joke played on a Russian ambassador 
in York Gardens in 1582, when the ambassador was hoping to 
get a lady of Elizabeth's court as a wife for the Czar. A mock- 
ing presentation of this lady was made with much ceremony. 



THE PLAYS OF THE FIRST PERIOD 147 

The Comedy of Errors. — Mistaken identity (which 
the Elizabethans called "Error") is nearly always 
amusing, whether on the stage or in actual life. The 
Comedy of Errors is a play in which this situation is 
developed to the extreme of improbability; but we 
lose sight of this in the roaring fun which results. 
Nowadays we should call a play of this type a farce, 
since most of the fun comes in this way from situations 
which are improbable, and since the play depends on 
these for success rather than on characterization or 
dialogue. 

A merchant of Syracuse has had twin sons, and 
bought twin servants for them. His wife with one twin 
son and his twin slave has been lost by shipwreck and 
has come to live in Ephesus. The other son and slave, 
when grown, have started out to find their brothers, 
and the father, some years later, starts out to find him. 
They come to Ephesus, and an amusing series of errors 
at once begins. The wife takes the wrong twin for 
her husband, the master beats the wrong slave, the 
wrong son disowns his father, the twin at Ephesus is 
arrested instead of his brother, and the twin slave 
Dromio of Syracuse is claimed as a husband by a black 
kitchen girl of Ephesus. The situation gets more and 
more mixed, until at last the real identity of the 
strangers from Syracuse is established, and all ends 
happily. 

Date. — There is much wordplay of a rather cheap kind, 
much doggerel, and much jingling rime in this play. All these 
things point to early work. A reference (III, ii, 125-127) to 
France " making war against her heir " admits the play to the 
period 1585-1594, when Henry of Navarre was received as king 



148 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

of France. The play was probably written not later than 1591. 
The play was first printed in the First Folio. 

Source. — Shakespeare borrowed most of his plot from the 
Menaechmi of Plautus. Shakespeare added to Plautus's story 
the second twin-slave and the parents, together with the girl 
whom the elder twin meets and loves in Syracuse. This elabo- 
ration of the plot adds much to the attractiveness of the whole 
story. From the Amphitruo of Plautus, Shakespeare derived 
the doubling of slaves, and the scene in which the younger twin 
and his slave are shut out of their own home. 

The Two Gentlemen of Verona is the first of the series 
of Shakespeare's romantic comedies. Our interest 
in this play turns upon the purely romantic characters ; 
two friends, one true, the other recreant; the true 
friend exiled to an outlaw's life in a forest, the false 
in favor at court ; two loving girls, one fair and radiant, 
the other dark and slighted, and following her lover 
in boy's dress ; two clowns, Speed and Lance, one a 
mere word tosser, the other of rare humor. The plot 
is of slighter importance ; a discovered elopement, and 
a maiden rescued from rude, uncivil hands, are the 
only incidents of account. All ends happily as in 
romance, and the recreant friend is forgiven. 

The Two Gentlemen of Verona was an experiment 
along certain directions which were later to repay the 
dramatist most richly. Here first an exquisite lyric in- 
terprets the romantic note in the play; here first the 
production of a troth-plight ring confounds the faith- 
less lover, and here we first meet one of the charming 
group of loving ladies in disguise. 

But as a whole the play is disappointing. The plot 
is too fantastic ; Proteus too much of a cad ; Julia, 
though brave and modest, is yet too faithful ; Valentine 



THE PLAYS OF THE FIRST PERIOD 149 

too easy a friend. The illusion of romance throws a 
transitory glamour over the scene, but, save in the de- 
velopment of character, the play seems immature, 
when compared with the greater comedies that fol- 
lowed it. 

. Date. — The first mention of the play is by Meres (1598) ; 
the first print that in the First Folio (1623). The presence of 
alternate riming sonnets and doggerel rime on the one hand, 
and of a number of double endings on the other, render 1592 a 
reasonable date. In its development of character it marks a 
great advance over the other two comedies of this period. 

Source. — The chief source was a story of a shepherdess, an 
episode in the Spanish novel, Diana Enamorada^ by Jorge de 
Montemayor (1592). Shakespeare probably read it in an 
English translation by B. Yonge, which had been in Ms. about 
ten years. This story gives Julia's part of the play, but contains 
no Valentine. The Silvia of the story, Celia, falls in love in- 
stead with the disguised Felismena, and when rejected kills 
herself. Whether it was Shakespeare who felt the need of a 
Valentine to support the tale, or whether this was done in the 
lost play of Felix and Philiomena, acted in 1584, cannot be 
told. The Valentine element may have been borrowed from 
another play, of which a German version exists (1620). 

Midsummer Night's Dream is Shakespeare's experi- 
ment in the fairy play. Four lovers, two young Athe- 
nians of high birth and their sweethearts, are almost 
inextricably tangled by careless Robin Goodf ellow, who 
has dropped the juice of love in idleness upon the eyes 
of the wrong lovers. King Oberon tricks his capricious 
and resentful little queen, by the aid of the same juice, 
into the absurdest infatuation for a clownish weaver, 
who has come out with his mates to rehearse a play to 
celebrate Theseus's wedding, but has fallen asleep and 



150 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

wakened to find an ass's head planted upon him. All 
comes right, as it ever must in fairyland; the true 
lovers are reunited; the faithful unloved lady gets her 
faithless lover; Titania repents and is forgiven ; and 
Theseus's wedding is graced by the "mirthf ullest tragedy 
that ever was seen." 

We have in Midsummer Niglifs Dream three distinct 
groups of characters — the lovers, the city clowns re- 
hearsing for the play, and the fairies. These three 
diverse groups are combined in the most skillful way 
by an intricate interweaving of plot and by the final 
appearance of all three groups at the wedding festivities 
of the Duke of Athens and his Amazon bride Hypolita. 
The characterization, light but delicate throughout, 
the mastery of the intricate story, the perfection of the 
comic parts, and the unsurpassed lyrical power of the 
poetry, are all the evidence we need that Shakespeare 
is now his own master in the drama, and can pass on 
to the supreme heights of his art. He has learned his 
trade for good and all. 

It is not a bad way of placing the last of the come- 
dies in the first period of Shakespeare's production, 
to say that it is the counterpart in comedy of Romeo 
and, Juliet. Like Romeo, Lysander has made love to 
Hermia, has sung at her window by moonlight, and has 
won her heart, while her father has promised her hand 
to another. Like the lovers in the tragedy, Lysander 
and Hermia plan flight, and an error in this plan would 
have been as fatal as it was in Romeo and Juliet, but 
for the kind interposition of the fairies. Again, the 
"tedious brief scene" of Pyramus and Thisbe, per- 
formed by the rustics at the close of the play, is noth- 



THE PLAYS OF THE FIRST PERIOD 151 

ing but a delightful parody on the very theme of Romeo 
and Juliet, even to the mistaken death, and the suicide 
of the heroine upon realization of the truth. At the 
end of the parody, as if in mockery of the Capulets 
and Montagues, Bottom starts up to tell us that " the 
wall is down that parted their fathers." Finally, the 
whole fairy story is the creation of Shakespeare in a 
Mercutio mood. 

In the diversity of its metrical form. Midsummer 
Nighfs Dream is also the counterpart of Romeo and 
Juliet. The abundance of rimed couplet, combined 
wherever there is intensity of feeling with a perfect 
form of blank verse, is reminiscent of the earlier play. 
Passages of equally splendid poetic power meet us all 
through, while at the same time we feel the very charm 
of youthful fervor in expression that the tragedy dis- 
played. 

Date. — There is nothing certain to guide us in assigning a 
date to the play, except the mention of it in Meres's list, in 
1598. The absence of a uniform structure of verse, the large 
proportion of rime (partly due, of course, to the nature of the 
play), the unequal measure of characterization, and the number 
of passages of purely lyric beauty argue an earlier date than 
students who notice only the skillful plot structure are willing 
to assign. Perhaps 1593-5 would indicate this variation in 
authorities. Some evidence, of the slightest kind, is advanced 
for 1594. A quarto was printed in 1600, another with the 
spurious date 1600, really in 1619. 

Source. — The plot of the lovers has no knov^rn direct source. 
The Diana Enamorada has a love potion with an effect similar 
to that of Oberon's. The wedding of Theseus and the Amazon 
queen is the opening theme of Chaucer's KnighVs Tale^ and 
some minor details may also have been borrowed from that 
Story. No doubt, Shakespeare had also read for details North's 



152 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

account of Theseus in his translation of Plutarch. Pyramus and 
Thisbe came originally from Ovid's Metamorphoses^ which had 
been translated into English before this time. Chaucer tells 
the same story in his Legend of Good Women. 

The fairies are almost entirely Shakespeare's creation. Ti- 
tania was one of Ovid's names for Diana ; Oberon was a common 
name for the fairy king, both in the Faerie Queene and else- 
where. Robin Goodfellow was a favorite character among the 
common folks. But fairies, as we all know them, are like the 
Twins in Through the Looking-glass, things of the fancy of one 
man, and that man Shakespeare. 

There is the atmosphere of a wedding about the whole play, 
and this fact has led most scholars to think that the play was 
written for some particular wedding, — just whose has never been 
settled. The flattery of the virgin Queen (II, i, 157 f .) and other 
references to purity might show that Queen Elizabeth was one 
of the wedding guests. 



CHAPTER XI 

THE PLATS OF THE SECOND PERIOD — COMEDY AND 

HISTORY 

It is difficult for us of to-day to realize that Shake- 
speare was ever less than the greatest dramatist of his 
time, to think of him as the pupil and imitator of 
other dramatists. He did, indeed, pass through this 
stage of his development with extraordinary rapidity, 
so that its traces are barely perceptible in the later 
plays of his First Period. In the plays of his Second 
Period even these traces disappear. If his portrayal 
of Shylock shows the influence of Marlowe's Jew of 
Malta, it is in no sense derivative, and it is the last 
appearance in Shakespeare's work of characterization 
clearly dependent upon the plays of his predecessors. 
However much Shakespeare's choice of themes may 
have been determined by the public taste or by the 
work of his fellows, in the creation of character he is 
henceforth his own master. Having acquired this 
mastery, he uses it to depict life in its most joyous 
aspect. For the time being he dwells little upon men's 
failures and sorrows. He does not ignore life's darker 
side, — he loved life too well for that, — but he uses it 
merely as a background for pictures of youth and 
happiness and success. Although among the comedies 
of this period he wrote also three historical plays, they 

153 



154 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

have not the tragic character of the earlier histories. 
They deal with youth and hope instead of crime, 
weakness, and failure. In the two parts of Henry IV 
there is quite as much comedy as there is history; in 
Henry F, even though the comic interest is slighter, 
the theme is still one of youth and joy as personified 
in the figure of the vigorous, successful young king. 
For convenience' sake, however, we may separate the 
histories from the comedies. To do this we shall 
have to depart somewhat from chronological order, 
and, since there are fewer histories, we shall consider 
them first. 

Henry IV, Part I. — To the development of Henry 
V from the wayward prince to one of England's 
most beloved heroes, Shakespeare devoted three plays, 
Henry IV, Parts I and II, and Henry V. The his- 
torical event around which the first of these centers 
is the rebellion of the Percies, which culminated in 
the defeat and death of Harry Percy, ' Hotspur,' on 
Shrewsbury field. In Richard II, Shakespeare had 
foreshadowed what was to come. The deposed king 
had prophesied that his successor, Henry Bolingbroke, 
crowned as Henry IV, would fall out with the great 
Percy family which had put him on the throne ; that 
the Percies would never be satisfied with what Henry 
would do for them ; and that Henry would hate and 
distrust them on the ground that those who had made 
a king could unmake one as well. And this prophecy 
was fulfilled. Uniting with the Scots under Douglas, 
with the Archbishop of York, with Glendower, who 
was seeking to reestablish the independence of Wales, 
and with Mortimer, the natural successor of Richard, 



THE PLAYS OF THE SECOND PERIOD 155 

the Percies raised the standard of revolt. What 
might have happened had all things gone as they were 
planned, we can never know ; but Northumberland, 
the head of the family, feigned sickness ; Glendower 
and Mortimer were kept away ; the Archbishop dallied ; 
and failure was the result. This situation gave Shake- 
speare an opportunity to paint a number of remark- 
able portraits ; but the scheming, crafty Worcester, the 
vacillating Northumberland, the mystic Glendower, 
are all overshadowed by the figure of Hotspur, wrong- 
headed, impulsive, yet so aflame with young life and 
enthusiasm, so ready to dare all for honor's sake, that 
he is almost more attractive than the Prince himself. 
Over against the older leaders of the rebellion stands 
the lonely figure of Henry IV, misunderstood and 
little loved by his sons, who has centered his whole 
existence upon getting and keeping the throne of 
England. To this one end he bends every energy of 
his shrewd, strong, hard nature. Such a man could 
never understand a personality like that of his older 
son, nor could the son understand the father. Prince 
Hal, loving life in all its manifestations, joy in all its 
forms, could find small satisfaction in the rigid eti- 
quette of a loveless court so long as it offered him 
an opportunity for little more than formal activity. 
When the rebellion of the Percies showed him that he 
could do the state real service, he seized his opportu- 
nity gladly, gayly, modestly. On his father's cause he 
centered the energies which he had previously scat- 
tered. With this new demand to meet, he no longer 
had time for his old companions. His old life was 
thrown off like a coat discarded under stress of work. 



156 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

Even before that time came, however, Hal was not 
one who could enjoy ordinary low company ; but the 
friends which had distracted him were far from ordi- 
nary. In Falstaff, the leader of the riotous group, 
Shakespeare created one of the greatest comic figures 
in all literature. Never at a loss, Falstaff masters 
alike sack, difficulties, and companions. He is an in- 
carnation of joy for whom moral laws do not exist. 
Because he will not fight when he sees no chance of 
victory, he has been called a coward, but no coward 
ever had such superb coolness in the face of danger. 
Falstaff's conduct in a fight is explained by his con- 
tempt for all conventions which bring no joy — a 
standard which reduces honor to a mere word. So 
full of joy was he that he inspired it in his compan- 
ions. To be with him was to be merry. 

Date. — The play was entered in the Stationers' Register, and a 
quarto was printed in 1598. Meres mentions the play without 
indicating whether he meant one part or both. The evidence 
of meter and style point to a date much earlier than Meres's 
entry, so that 1597 is the year to which Part I is commonly 
assigned. 

Source. — For the serious plot of this play, Shakespeare drew 
upon Holinshed. He had no scruples, however, against altering 
history for dramatic purposes. Thus he brings within a much 
shorter period of time the battles in Wales and Scotland, makes 
Hal and Hotspur of approximately the same age, and unites two 
people in the character of Mortimer. The situations in the 
scenes which show Hal with Falstaff and his fellows are largely 
borrowed from an old play called The Famous Victories of Henry 
V, but this source furnished only the barest and crudest outlines, 
and gave practically no hint of the characters as Shakespeare 
conceived them. The reference in Act I, Sc. ii, to Falstaff as 
the ' old lad of the castle ' shows that his name was originally 



THE PLAYS OF THE SECOND PERIOD 157 

Oldcastle, as in The Famous Victories. Oldcastle was a historical 
personage quite unlike Falstaff , and it is supposed that the change 
was made to spare the feeling of Oldcastle's descendants. 

Henry IV, Part II. — This part is less a play than a 
series of loosely connected scenes. The final suppression 
of the rebellion, which had been continued by the Arch- 
bishop of York, the sickness and death of Henry IV, 
and the accession of Prince Hal as Henry V, are matters 
essentially undramatic and incapable of unified treat- 
ment, while the growing separation of Hal and Falstaff 
deprived the underplot of that close connection with 
the main action which it had in the preceding play. 
Feeling the weakness of the main plot, Shakespeare 
reduced it to a subordinate position, making it little 
more than a series of historical pictures inserted be- 
tween the scenes in which Falstaff and his companions 
figure. He enriched this part of the play, on the other 
hand, by the introduction of a number of superbly 
poetical speeches, the best known of which is that be- 
ginning, ^' Sleep, gentle Sleep." To the comic 
groups Shakespeare added a number of new figures, 
among them the braggart Pistol, whose speech bristles 
with the high-sounding terms he has borrowed from 
the theater, and old Justice Shallow, so fond of recall- 
ing the gay nights and days which are as much figments 
of his imagination as is his assumed familiarity with 
the great John of Gaunt. By placing more stress upon 
the evil and less pleasing sides of Falstaff's nature, 
Shakespeare evidently intended to prepare his readers' 
minds for the definite break between old Jack and the 
new king; but in this wonderful man he had created a 
character so fascinating that he could not spoil it; and 



158 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

the king's public rejection of Falstaff comes as a pain- 
ful shock which impresses one as much with the coldly- 
calculating side of the Bolingbroke nature as it does 
with the sad inevitability of the rupture. 

Source and Date. — The sources for this play are the same as 
those of its predecessor. Although the first and only quarto 
was not printed until 1600, there is a reference to this part in 
Jonson's Every Man Out of his Humour^ which was produced 
in 1599. It must, therefore, have been written shortly after 
Part I, and it is accordingly dated 1598. 

Henry V. — In this, which is really the third play of 
a trilogy, Shakespeare adopted a manner of treatment 
quite unlike that which characterizes the other two. 
Henry V is really a dramatized epic, an almost lyric 
rhapsody cast in the form of dialogue. Ealstaff has 
disappeared from view, and is recalled only by the 
affecting story of his death. This episode, however, 
brief as it is, reveals the love which the old knight 
evoked from his companions, while the narrative of 
his last hours is the more pathetic for being put in the 
mouth of the comic figure of Dame Quickly. FalstafP's 
place was one which could not be filled, and the comic 
scenes become comparatively insignificant, although 
the quarrels of Pistol and the Welshman Fluellen have 
a distinctive humor. A figur-e which replaces the classic 
chorus connects the scattered historical scenes by means 
of superb narrative verse. Each episode glorifies a 
new aspect of Henry's character. We see him as the 
valiant soldier; as the leader rising superior to tre- 
mendous odds; as the democratic king who, concealing 
his rank, talks and jests with a common soldier; and 



THE PLAYS OF THE SECOND PERIOD 159 

as the bluff, hearty suitor of a foreign bride. In thus 
seeing him, moreover, we see not only the individual 
man ; we see him as an ideal Englishman, as the em- 
bodiment of the type which the men of Shakespeare's 
day — and of ours, too, for that matter — loved and 
admired and honored. In celebrating Henry's victories, 
Shakespeare was also celebrating England's more recent 
victories over her enemies abroad, so that the play is a 
great national psean, the song of heroic, triumphant 
England. 

Date and Source. — Like its predecessors, Henry Fis founded 
on Holinshed, with some additions taken from the Famous Vic- 
tories. The allusion in the chorus which precedes Act V to 
the Irish expedition of the Earl of Essex fixes the date of com- 
position between April 14 and September 28, 1599. A quarto, 
almost certainly pirated, was printed in 1600 and reprinted in 
1602, 1608, and 1619 (in the latter with the false date of 1608). 
The text of these quartos is, therefore, much inferior to that of 
the Folio. 

The Merchant of Venice. — As usually presented on the 
modern stage. The Merchant of Venice appears to be a 
comedy, which is overshadowed by one tragic figure, 
that of the Jew Shylock, the representative of a down- 
trodden people, deprived of his money by a tricky 
lawyer and deprived of his daughter by a tricky Chris- 
tian. Students, on the other hand, have maintained 
that to the Elizabethans Shylock was merely a comic 
figure, the defeat of whose vile plot to get the life of 
his Christian debtor, Antonio, by taking a pound of his 
flesh in place of the unpaid gold, was greeted with 
shouts of delighted laughter. As a matter of fact, 
Shylock, then as now, was a human being, and by virtue 



160 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARjfl 

of that fact both ridiculous and pathetic. In any case, 
whatever the dominant note of his character, he is not 
the dominant figure of the play. If he were, the fifth 
act, which ends the play with moonlight and music and 
the laughter of happy lovers, would be distinctly out 
of place. Yet it is in reality the absence of such de- 
fects of taste, the ability to bring everything into its 
proper place, to make a harmonious whole out of the 
most various tones, which best characterizes the Shake- 
spearean comedy of this period. Instead of being a 
play in which one great character is set in relief against 
a number of lesser ones, Tlie Merchant of Venice is a 
comedy in which there is an unusually large number 
of characters of nearly equal importance and an un- 
usually large number of plots of nearly equal interest. 
There is the plot which has to do with Portia's mar- 
riage, in which the right lover wins this gracious merry 
lady by choosing the proper one of three locked caskets. 
There is the plot which deals with the elopement of 
the Jew's daughter, Jessica. There is the plot which 
relates the story of the bond given by Antonio to the 
Jew in return for the loanHwhich enables Antonio's 
friend, Bassanio, to carry on his suit for Portia's hand, 
the bond, which, when forfeited, would have cost An- 
tonio his life had not Portia, disguised as a lawyer, 
defeated Shylock's treacherous design. There is the 
plot which tells how Bassanio and his friend Gratiano 
give their wedding rings as rewards to the pretended 
lawyer and his assistant, really their wives Portia and 
Nerissa in disguise, — an act which gives the wives a 
chance to make much trouble for their lords. And all 
these plots are worked out with an abundance of interest- 



THE PLAYS OF THE SECOND PERIOD 161 

ing detail, and are so perfectly interwoven that the play 
has all of the wonderful harmony of a Turkish rug, as 
well as its brilliant variety. No play of Shakespeare's 
depends more for its effect on plot, on the sheer interest 
of the stories, and no one has, consequently, situations 
which are more effective on the stage. It is, perhaps, 
an inevitable result that the individual characters have 
a somewhat less permanent, less deeply satisfying charm 
than do those of the comedies which follow. None of 
these successors, however, presents a larger or more 
varied group of delightful men and women. 

Date. — The later limit of the date is settled by the mention 
of this play in Meres' s catalogue, and by its entry in the Sta- 
tioners' Register of that same year. Basing their opinion on ex- 
tremely unsubstantial internal evidence, some scholars have dated 
the play as early as 1594, but the evidence of style and construc- 
tion make a date before 1596 unlikely. Two quartos were 
printed, one in 1600 ; the other, though copying the date 1600 
upon its title-page, was probably printed in 1619. 

Source. — The story of the pound of flesh and that of the 
choice of caskets are extremely ancient. The former is com- 
bined with that of the wedding rings in Fiorentino's II Pecorone 
(the first novel of the fourth day) , a story which Shakespeare 
probably knew and may have used. Alexander Silvayn's The 
Orator, printed in English translation in 1596, has, in connection 
with a bond episode, speeches made by a Jew which may be 
the source of some of Shylock's lines. The combination of 
these plots with those of Jessica and Nerissa is, so far as we can 
yet prove, original with Shakespeare ; but we cannot be certain 
how much The Merchant of Venice resembles a lost play of the 
Jew? mentioned in Gosson's School of Abiise (1579), "represent- 
ing the greediness of worldly chusers, and bloody mindes of 
Usurers." 

The Taming of the Shrew. — TJie Taming of the Shrew 
is only in part the work of Shakespeare. Just how 

M 



162 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

much he had to do with making over the underplot, we 
shall probably never know ; but, in any case, he did 
not write the dialogue of this part of the play, and its 
construction is not particularly remarkable. The win- 
ning of a girl by a suitor disguised as a teacher is a 
conventional theme of comedy, as is the disguising of a 
stranger to take the place of an absent father in order 
to confirm a young lover's suit. The main plot Shake- 
speare certainly left as he found it. It tells how an 
ungovernable, willful girl was made into a submissive 
wife by a husband who assumed for the purpose a man- 
ner even wilder than her own, so wild that not even she 
could endure it. This story is presented in scenes of 
uproarious farce in which there is little opportunity for 
subtle characterization or the higher sort of comedy. 
What Shakespeare did was to give to the hero and 
heroine, Petruchio and Katherine, a semblance of reality, 
and to add enormously to the life and movement of the 
scenes in which they appear. Some of these scenes 
are very effective on the stage, but they are not of a 
sort to reveal Shakespeare's greatest qualities. The 
induction, the framework in which the play is set, is, 
however, quite another matter. The story of the 
drunken tinker. Sly, unfortunately omitted in many 
modern presentations, is a little masterpiece. A 
nobleman returning from the hunt finds Sly lying in a 
drunken stupor before an inn. The nobleman has Sly 
taken to his country house, has him dressed in rich 
clothing, has him awakened by servants who make him 
believe that he is really a lord, and finally has the play 
performed before him. The outline of this induction 
was in the old play which Shakespeare revised ; but 



THE PLAYS OF THE SECOND PERIOD 163 

lie developed the crude work of his predecessor into 
scenes so delightfully realistic, into characterization so 
richly humorous, that this induction takes its place 
among the great comic episodes of literature. 

Date. — No certain evidence for the date of this play exists, 
even the metrical tests failing us because of the collaboration. 
It is commonly assigned to the years 1596-7, but this is little 
more than a guess. 

Source. — As has already been indicated, this play is the re- 
vision of an older play entitled The Taming of a Shrew. The 
latter vyas probably written by a disciple of Marlowe, and was 
first printed in quarto in 1594. The chief change which the re- 
vision made in the plot was that which gave Katherine one sister 
instead of two and added the interest of rival suitors for this 
sister's hand. Stories concerning the taming of a shrewish 
woman are both ancient and common, but no direct antecedent 
of the older play has been discovered, although some incidents 
seem to have been borrowed from Gascoigne's Supposes, a trans- 
lation from the Italian of Ariosto. 

Authorship. — The identity of Shakespeare's collaborator is 
unknown, nor is it possible to define exactly the limits of his 
work. It is practically certain, however, that Shakespeare 
wrote the Induction ; II, i, 169-326 ; III, ii, with the possible 
exception of 130-150 ; IV, i, iii, and v ; V, ii, at least as far as 
175. 

The Merry Wives of Windsor. — The Merry Wives is 
the only comedy in which Shakespeare avowedly pre- 
sents the middle-class people of an English town. In 
other comedies English characters and customs appear 
through the thin disguise of Italian names ; in the 
histories there are comic scenes drawn from English 
life ; but only here does Shakespeare desert the city 
and the country for the small town and draw the larger 
number of his characters from the great middle class. 



164 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

A tradition has come down to us, one which is supported 
by the nature of the play, that Queen Elizabeth was so 
fascinated by the character of Ealstaff as he appeared 
in Henry IV that she requested Shakespeare to show 
Falstaff in love, and that Shakespeare, in obedience to 
this command, wrote the play within a fortnight. 
Unless this tradition be true, it is difficult to explain 
why Shakespeare should have written a comedy which 
is, in comparison with his other work of this period, 
at once conventional and mediocre. The subject — the 
intrigues of Falstaff with two married women, and the 
wooing of a commonplace girl by two foolish suitors 
and another as commonplace as herself — gave Shake- 
speare little opportunity for poetry and none for the 
portrayal of the types of character most congenial to 
his temperament. The greatest blemish on the play, 
however, from the standpoint of a student of Shake- 
speare, is that the man called Falstaff is not Falstaff 
at all, that this Falstaff bears only an outward resem- 
blance to the Falstaff of the historical plays. If we 
may misquote the poet, Falstaff died a martyr, and 
this is not the man. The real Falstaff would never 
have stooped to the weak devices adopted by the man 
who bears his name, would never have been three times 
the dupe of transparent tricks. The task demanded 
of Shakespeare was one impossible of performance. 
Falstaff could not have fallen in love in the way which 
the queen desired. Nor is there much to compensate 
for this degradation of the greatest comic figure in 
literature. Falstaff's companions share, although to a 
lesser degree, in their leader's fall, while the two comic 
figures which are original with this play are compara- 



THE PLAYS OF THE SECOND PERIOD 165 

tively unsuccessful studies in French and Welsh 
dialect. Judged by Shakespeare's own standard, this 
work is as middle-class as its characters ; judged by 
any other, it is an amusing comedy of intrigue, real- 
istic in type and abounding in comic situations which 
approach the borderland of farce. 

Date. — ■ This play was entered on the books of the Stationers' 
Company January 18, 1602. It was certainly written after the 
two parts of Henry IV, and if, as is most probable, the character 
of Nym is a revival and not an imperfect first sketch, the play 
must have succeeded Henry V. On these grounds the play is 
best assigned to 1599. It was first printed in quarto in 1602, 
but this version is extremely faulty, besides being considerably 
shorter than that of the First Folio. The quarto seems to 
have been printed from a stenographic report of an acting ver- 
sion of the play, made by an unskillful reporter for a piratical 
publisher. 

Source. — The main plot resembles a story derived from an 
Italian source which is found in Tarlton's iVeios out of Purgatorie. 
For the underplot and a number of details in the working out 
of the main plot, no source is known. 

Much Ado About Nothing. — In this play, as nowhere 
else, Shakespeare has given us the boon of laughter — 
not the smile, not the uncontrolled guffaw, but rip- 
pling, melodious laughter. From the beginning to the 
end this is the dominant note. If the great trio of 
which this was the first be classified as romantic 
comedies, we may perhaps say that in speaking of the 
others we should lay the stress on the word ' romantic,' 
in this, on the word ^ comedy.' As regards the main 
plot, Mzich Ado is, to be sure, the most serious of the 
three. When the machinations of the villainous Prince 
John lead Claudio to believe his intended bride un- 



166 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

faithful, and to reject this pure-sciiled Hero with 
violence and contumely at the very steps of the altar, 
we have a situation which borders on the tragic. The 
mingled doubt, rage, and despair of Hero's father is, 
moreover, undoubtedly affecting. Nevertheless, power- 
ful as these scenes are, they are so girt about with 
laughter that they cannot destroy our good spirits. 
Even at their height, the manifestations of human 
wickedness, credulity, and weakness seem but the il- 
lusions of a moment, soon to be dissipated by the 
power of radiant mirth. It is not without significance 
that the deep-laid plot should be defeated through the 
agency of the immortal Dogberry, most deliciously 
foolish of constables. Nor is it mere chance that 
Hero and Claudio are so constantly accompanied by 
Beatrice and Benedick, that amazing pair to whom 
life is one long jest. In the merry war which is con- 
stantly raging between these two, their shafts never 
fail of their mark, but neither is once wounded. Like 
magnesium lights, their minds send forth showers of 
brilliant sparks which hit, but do not wound. But 
their wit is something more than empty sparkle. It 
is the effervescence of abounding life, a life too sound 
and perfect to be devoid of feeling. Their brilliancy 
does not conceal emptiness, but adorns abundance. 
When such an occasion as Hero's undeserved rejection 
called for it, the true affection of Beatrice and the true 
manliness of Benedick appeared. Hence, although both 
seem duped by the trick which forms the underplot, 
the ruse which was to make each think the other to 
be the lovelorn one, it is really they who win the day. 
Their feelings are not altered by this merry plot ; they 



THE PLAYS OF THE SECOND PERIOD 167 

are merely given a chance to drop tlie mask of banter 
and to express without confusion the love which had 
long been theirs. Thus the play which began with 
the silvery laughter of Beatrice ends in general mirth 
which is yet more joyous. 

Date. — Since Much Ado is not mentioned by Meres, it can 
hardly have been written before 1598. Entries in the Stationers' 
Register for August 4 and 24, 1600, and the appearance of a 
quarto edition in this same year limit the possibilities at the 
other end. Since the title-page of the quarto asserts that this 
play had been "sundry times publicly acted," we may assign 
the date 1599 with considerable confidence. 

Source. — The main plot was derived originally from the 
twentieth novel of Bandello, but there is no direct evidence 
that Shakespeare used either this or its French translation in 
Belleforest. In this story Benedick and Beatrice do not appear ; 
there is no public rejection of Hero ; there is no discovery 
of the plot by Dogberry and his fellows ; and the deception 
of Claudio is differently managed, Shakespeare's treatment of 
this last detail has its source in an episode of the fifth book of 
Ariosto's Orlando Furioso^ a work several times done into 
English before Shakespeare's play was written. There is con- 
siderable reason for assuming the existence of a lost original for 
Much Ado in the shape of a play, known only by title, called 
Benedicke and Betteris ; but it is, of course, impossible to say 
how much Shakespeare may have owed to this hypothetical 
predecessor. 

As You Like It. — Of this most idyllic of all Shake- 
speare's comedies, the Forest of Arden is not merely 
the setting; it is the central force of the play, the 
power which brings laughter out of tears and harmony 
out of discord. It reminds us of Sherwood forest, the 
home of Robin Hood and his merry men; but it is 
more than this. Not only does it harbor beasts and 
trees never found on English soil, but its shadowy 



168 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

glades foster a life so free from care and trouble that 
it becomes to us a symbol of Nature's healing, sweet- 
ening influence. Here an exiled Duke and his faith- 
ful followers have found a refuge where, free from the 
envy and bickerings of court, they " fleet the time 
carelessly, as they did in the Golden Age." To them 
comes the youth Orlando, fleeing from the treachery 
of a wicked elder brother and from the malice of the 
usurping Duke. To them comes Rosalind, daughter 
of the exiled Duke, who has lived at the usurper's 
court, but has, in her turn, been exiled, and who brings 
with her Celia, the usurper's daughter, and Touchstone, 
the lovable court fool. And through these newcomers 
the Duke and his friends are brought into contact with 
a shepherd and shepherdess as unreal and as charming 
as those of Dresden china, and with other country 
folk who smack more strongly of the soil. In the 
forest, Rosalind, who has for safety's sake assumed 
man's attire, again meets Orlando, and the love between 
them, born of their first meeting at court, becomes 
stronger and truer amid scenes of delicate comedy 
and merry laughter. Once in Arden, Orlando ceases 
to brood morosely over the wrongs done him ; Rosa- 
lind's wit becomes sweeter while losing none of its 
keenness; and Touchstone feels himself no longer a 
plaything, but a man. So we are not surprised when 
Oliver, the wicked brother, lost in the forest and 
rescued from mortal danger by the lad he has always 
sought to injure, awakens to his better self; nor when 
the usurping Duke, leading an armed expedition 
against the man he has deposed, is converted at the 
forest's edge by an old hermit, abandons the throne to 



THE PLAYS OF THE SECOND PERIOD 169 

its rightful occupant, and enters upon the religious life. 
Thus the old Duke comes into his own again, wisei 
and better than before; and if, among the many- 
marriages which fill the last act with the chiming of 
marriage bells, there are some which seem little likely 
to bring lasting happiness, the magic of the woods 
does much to dissipate our doubts. Only Jaques, the 
melancholy philosopher, fails to share in the general 
rejoicing and the glad return. He has been too hard- 
ened by the pursuit of his own pleasure and is too shut 
in by his delightfully cynical philosophy to feel quickly 
the forest's touch. Yet not even his brilliant perver- 
sities can sadden the joyous atmosphere; it is only 
made the more enjoyable by force of contrast. Since 
Jaques wishes no joy for himself, we wish none for 
him, and with little regret we leave him as he has 
lived, a lonely, fascinating figure. 

Date. — Like Much Ado^ As You Like It is not mentioned 
by Meres, and was entered in the Stationers' Register on 
August 4, 1600. Some critics have placed this play before 
Much Ado, but, although there is little evidence on either side, 
the style and tone of the play incline us to place it after, dating 
it 1599-1600. 

Source. — As Tou Like It is a dramatization of Lodge's 
pastoral novel entitled Bosalynde, which was founded in its 
turn on the Tale of Gamelyn, incorrectly ascribed to Chaucer. 
Shakespeare condensed his original to great advantage, leaving 
out many episodes and so changing others as to give the subject 
a new and higher unity. The atmosphere of the forest is all 
of his creation, as are many of the characters, including Jaques 
and Touchstone. 

Twelfth Night, or What You Will. — In Twelfth Night 
romance and comedy are less perfectly fused than in 



170 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

the comedy wliich preceded it. Here there are two 
distinct groups of characters, on the one hand riotous 
old Sir Toby and his crew leading the Puritanical 
steward Malvolio into the trap baited by his own 
egotism; on the other, the dreaming Duke, in love 
with love rather than with the beautiful Olivia whom 
he woos in vain, and ardently loved by Viola, whose 
gentle nature is in touching contrast with the doublet 
and hose which misfortune has compelled her to 
assume. There is, however, no lack of dramatic 
unity. In Olivia the two groups meet, for Toby is 
Olivia's uncle, Malvolio her steward, the Duke her 
lover, Viola — later happily supplanted by her twin 
brother Sebastian — the one she loves. Thus the 
romantic and comic forces act and react upon each 
other. Yet this play, by reason of its setting, the 
court of Illyria, was bound to lack the magical atmos- 
phere of the forest, which inspired kindly humor in 
the serious and gentle seriousness in the merry. If 
Feste is as witty as Touchstone, he is less of a man ; 
if Viola is more appealing than Rosalind, she has a 
less sparkling humor. Here the love story is more 
passionate, the fun more uproarious. Toby is not 
Falstaff; he is overcome by wine and difficulties as 
that amazing knight never was ; but it is a sad soul 
which does not roar with Toby in his revels ; shout 
with laughter over the duel which he arranges be- 
tween the shrinking Viola and the foolish, vain Sir 
Andrew ; and shake in sympathy with his glee over 
Malvolio's plight when that unlucky man is beguiled 
into thinking Olivia loves him, and into appearing 
before her cross-gartered and wreathed in the smiles 



THE PLAYS OF THE SECOND PERIOD 171 

■whicli accord so ill with his sour visage. All the more 
affecting in contrast to this boisterous merriment is 
the frail figure of Viola, who knows so well "what 
love women to men may owe." Amid the perfume of 
flowers and the sob of violins the Duke learns to love 
this seeming boy better than he knows, and easily 
forgets the romantic melancholy which was never 
much more than an agreeable pose. 

Date. — In the diary of John Manningham for February 2, 
1602, is a record of a performance of Twelfth Night in the Middle 
Temple. The absence of the name from Meres's list again limits 
the date at the other end. The internal evidence, aside from 
that of style and meter, is negligible, while the latter confirms 
the usually accepted date of 1601. 

Source. — The principal source of the plot was probably 
Apolonius and Silla^ a story by Barnabe Riche, apparently an 
adaptation of Belleforest's translation of the twenty-eighth novel 
of Bandello. There was also an Italian play, GV Ingannati, 
acted in Latin translation at Cambridge in 1590 and 1598, which 
has a similar plot. A German play on the same subject, 
apparently closely connected with Riche, has given rise to the 
hypothesis that a lost English play preceded Twelfth Night; 
but this is only conjectural, and there is some evidence that 
Shakespeare was familiar with Riche' s story. If this be the 
original, Shakespeare improved on it as much as he did on 
Bosalynde^ condensing the beginning, knitting together the 
loose strands at the end, and introducing the whole of the 
underplot with its rich variety of characters. The only hint for 
this known is a slight suggestion for Malvolio's madness found 
m another story of Riche's volume. 



CHAPTER XII 

THE PLAYS OF THE THIRD PERIOD — TRAGEDY 

The Second and Third periods slightly overlap; 
for Julius Ccesar, the first play of the later group, was 
probably written before Twelfth Night and As Tou 
Like It. But the change in the character of the plays 
in these two periods is sharp and decisive, like the 
change from day to night. Shakespeare has studied 
the sunlight of human cheerfulness and found it a 
most interesting problem ; now in the mysterious star- 
light and shadow of human suffering he finds a prob- 
lem more interesting still. 

The three comedies of this period, partly on account 
of their bitter and sarcastic tone, are not widely read 
nor usually very much admired ; but the great trage- 
dies are the poet's finest work and scarcely equaled in 
the history of the world. 

Troilus and Cressida. — Here the story centers around 
the siege of ancient Troy by the Greeks. Its hero, 
Troilus, is a young son of Priam, high-spirited and en- 
thusiastic, who is in love with Cressida, daughter of a 
Trojan priest. Pandarus, Cressida's uncle, acts as go- 
between for the lovers. Just as the suit of Troilus is 
crowned with success, Cressida, from motives of pol- 
icy, is forced to join her father Calchas, who is in the 
camp of the besieging Greeks. Here her fickle and 
sensuous nature reveals itself rapidly. She yields to 

172 



THE PLAYS OF THE THIRD PERIOD 173 

the love of the Greek commander Diomed and promises 
to become his mistress. Troilus learns of this, con- 
signs her to oblivion, and attempts, but unsuccessfully, 
to take revenge on Diomed. 

While this love story is progressing, meetings are 
going on between the Greek and Trojan warriors ; a 
vivid picture is given of conditions in the Greek camp 
during the truce, and particularly of the insolent pride 
of Achilles. The story ends with the resumption of 
hostilities, the slaying of Hector by Achilles, and the 
resolution of Troilus to revenge his brother's death. 

It is very difficult to understand what Shakespeare 
meant by this play. If it is a tragedy, why do the 
hero and heroine meet with no special disaster at 
the end, and why do we feel so little sympathy for the 
misfortunes of any one in the play ? If it is a comedy, 
why is its sarcastic mirth made more bitter than tears, 
and why does it end with the death of its noblest 
minor character and with the violation of all poetic 
justice ? From beginning to end it is the story of dis- 
illusion, for it sorts all humanity into two great classes, 
fools who are cheated and knaves who cheat. Some 
people think that Shakespeare wrote it in a gloomy, 
pessimistic mood, with the sardonic laughter of a dis- 
appointed, world-wearied man. Others, on rather 
doubtful grounds, believe it a covert satire on some of 
Shakespeare's fellow dramatists. 

Authorship. — It is generally agreed that a small part of this 
play is by another author. The Prologue and most of the Fifth 
Act are usually considered non-Shakespearean. They differ 
from the rest of the play in many details of vocabulary, meter, 
and style. 



174 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

Date. — Troilus and Cressida must have been written before 
1603, for in the spring of that year an entry in regard to it was 
made in the Stationers' Register. It must have been written 
after 1601, for it alludes (Prologue, 11. 23-25) to the Prologue of 
Jonson's Poetaster, a play published in that year. Hence the 
date of composition would fall during or slightly before 1602. 
The First Quarto was not published until 1609. 

Sources. — The main source of this drama was the nar- 
rative poem Troilus and Criseyde by Chaucer. Contrary to 
his custom, Shakespeare has degraded the characters of his orig- 
inal, instead of ennobling them. The camp scenes are adapted 
from Caxton's Becuyell of the Historyes of Troye ; and the 
challenge of Hector was taken from some translation of Homer, 
probably that by Chapman. An earlier lost play on this subject 
by Dekker and Chettle is mentioned in contemporary reference. 
"We do not know whether Shakespeare drew anything from it 
or not. Scattered hints were probably taken from other 
sources, as the story of Troy was very popular in the Middle 
Ages. 

All's Well That Ends Well. — When a beautiful and 
noble-minded young woman falls in love with a con- 
temptible scoundrel, forgives his rebuffs, compromises 
her own dignity to win his affection, and finally per- 
suades him to let her throw herself away on him, — 
is the result a romance or a tragedy ? This is a nice 
question ; and by the answer to it we must determine 
whether AlVs Well That Ends Well is a romantic 
comedy like Twelfth Night or a satirical comedy bitter 
as tragedy, like Troilus and Cressida. 

Helena, a poor orphan girl, has been brought up by 
the kindly old Countess of Rousillon, and cherishes a 
deep affection for the Countess's son Bertram, though 
he neither suspects it nor returns it. She saves the 
life of the French king, and he in gratitude allows her 



THE PLAYS OF THE THIRD PERIOD 175 

to choose lier husband from among the noblest young 
lords of France. Her choice falls on Bertram. Being 
too politic to offend the king, he reluctantly marries 
her, but forsakes her on their wedding day to go to the 
wars. At parting he tells her that he will never ac- 
cept her as a wife until she can show him his ring on 
her finger and has a child by him. By disguising her- 
self as a young woman whom Bertram is attempting 
to seduce, Helena subsequently fulfills the terms of 
his hard condition. Later, before the king of France 
she reminds him of his promise, shows his ring in her 
possession, and states that she is with child by him. 
The count, outwitted, and in fear of the king's wrath, 
repentantly accepts her as his wife; and at the end 
Helena is expected to live happily forever after. 

Disagreeable as the plot is when told in outline, it is 
redeemed in the actual play by the beautiful character 
given to the heroine. But this, while it vastly tones 
down the disgusting side of the story, only increases the 
bitter pathos which is latent there. The more lovely 
and admirable Helena is, the more she is unfitted for 
the unworthy part which she is forced to act and the 
man with whom she is doomed to end her days. A 
modern thinker could easily read into this " comedy " 
the world-old bitterness of pearls before swine. 

Date. — No quarto of this comedy exists, nor is there any 
mention of such a play as AlVs Well That Ends Well before 
the publication of the First Folio in 1623. A play of Shake- 
speare's called Lovers Labour''s Won is mentioned by Francis 
Meres in 1598 ; and many think that this was the present 
comedy under another name. However, the meter, style, and 
mood of most of the play seem to indicate a later date. The 



176 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

most common theory is that a first version was written before 
1598, and that this was rewritten in the early part of the author's 
third period. This would put the date of the play in its 
present form somewhere around 1602. 

Sources. — The story is taken from Boccaccio's Decameron 
(ninth novel of the third day). It was translated into Eng- 
lish by Painter in his Palace of Pleasure^ where our author 
probably read it. Shakespeare has added the Countess, Pa- 
rolles, and one or two minor characters. The conception of the 
heroine has been greatly ennobled. It is a question whether 
the bitter tone of the play is due to the dramatist's intention or 
is the unforeseen result of reducing Boccaccio's improbable 
story to a living possibility. 

Measure for Measure. — When Hamlet told his guilty 
mother that he would set her up a glass where she 
might see the inmost part of her, he was doing for his 
mother what Shakespeare in Measure for Measure is 
doing for the lust-spotted world. The play is a 
trenchant satire on the evils of society. Such realis- 
tic pictures of the things that are, but should not be, 
have always jarred on our aesthetic sense from Aris- 
tophanes to Zola, and Measure for Measure is one of 
the most disagreeable of Shakespeare's plays. But no 
one can deny its power. 

Here, as in AlVs Well That Ends Well, we have one 
beautiful character, that of Isabella, like a light 
shining in corruption. Here, too, the wronged Mariana, 
in order to win back the faithless Angelo, is forced to 
resort to the same device to which Helena had to 
stoop. But this play is darker and more savage than 
its predecessor. Angelo, as a governor, sentencing 
men to death for the very sin which he as a private 
man is trying to commit, is contemptible on a huger 



THE PLAYS OF THE THIRD PERIOD 177 

and more devilish scale than Bertram. Lucio, if not 
more base than Parolles, is at least more malignant. 
And Claudio, attempting to save his life by his sister's 
shame, is an incarnation of the healthy animal joy of 
life almost wholly divested of the ideals of manhood. 
In a way, the play ends happily ; but it is about as 
cheerful as the red gleam of sunset which shoots 
athwart a retreating thunderstorm. 

Date. — The play was first published in the Folio of 1623. 
It is generally believed, however, that it was written about 1603. 
In the first place, the verse tests and general character of the 
play seem to fit that date ; secondly, there are two passages, 
I, i, 68-73 and II, iv, 27-30, which are usually interpreted as 
allusions to the attitude of James I toward the people after he 
came to the throne in 1603 ; and, thirdly, there are many turns 
of phrase which remind one of Hamlet and which seem to indi- 
cate that the two plays were written near together. Barksted's 
Myrrha (1607) contains a passage apparently borrowed from 
this comedy, which helps in determining the latest possible date 
of composition. 

Sources. — Shakespeare borrowed his material from a writer 
named George Whetstone, who in 1578 printed a play. Promos 
and Cassandra^ containing most of the story of Measure for 
Measure. In 1582 the same author published a prose version 
of the story in his Heptameron of Civil Discourses. "Whet- 
stone in turn borrowed his material, which came originally 
from the Hecatommithi of Giraldi Cinthio. Shakespeare en- 
nobled the underlying thought as far as he could, and added 
the character of Mariana. 

Julius Caesar. — The interest in Julius Ccesar does 
not focus on any one person as completely as in the 
other great tragedies. Like the chronicle plays which 
had preceded it, it gives rather a grand panorama of 
history than the fate of any particular hero. This ex- 

N 



-n/I 



178 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

plains its title. It is not tlie story of Julius Caesar 
the man, but of tliat great political upheaval of which 
Caesar was cause and center. That upheaval begins 
with his attempt at despotism and the crown; it 
reaches its climax in his death, which disturbs the 
political equilibrium of the whole nation ; and at last 
subsides with the decline and downfall of Caesar's- 
enemies. Shakespeare has departed from history in 
drawing the character of the great conqueror, making 
it more weak, vain, and pompous than that of the real 
man. Yet even in the play " the mightiest Julius " 
is an impressive figure. Alive, he 

" doth bestride the narrow world 
Like a Colossus" ; 

and his influence, like an unseen force, shapes the fates 
of the living after he himself is dead. 

In so far as the tragedy has any individual hero, 
that hero is Brutus rather than Caesar himself. Brutus 
is a man of noble character, but deficient in practical 
judgment and knowledge of men. With the best of 
motives he allows Cassius to hoodwink him and draw 
him into the conspiracy against Caesar. Through the 
same short-sighted generosity he allows his enemy 
Antony to address the crowd after Caesar's death, with 
the result that Antony rouses the people against him 
and drives him and his fellow conspirators out of 
Rome. Then when he and Cassius gather an army in 
Asia to fight with Antony, we find him too impracti- 
cally scrupulous to raise money by the usual means ; 
and for that reason short of cash and drawn into a 
quarrel with his brother general. His subsequent 



THE PLAYS OF THE THIRD PERIOD 179 

death at Philippi is the logical outcome of his own na- 
ture, too good for so evil an age, too short-sighted for 
so critical a position. 

Most of the old Roman heroes inspire respect rather 
than love; and something of their stern impressive- 
ness lingers in the atmosphere of this Roman play. 
Here and there it has very touching scenes, such as 
that between Brutus and his page (IV, iii) ; but 
in the main it is great, not through its power to 
elicit sympathetic tears, but through its dignity and 
grandeur. It is one of the stateliest of tragedies, 
lofty in language, majestic in movement, logical and 
cogent in thought. We can never mourn for Brutus 
and Portia as we do for Romeo and Juliet, or for Lear 
and Cordelia; but we feel that we have breathed in 
their company an air which is keen and bracing, and 
have caught a glimpse of 

" The grandeur that was Rome." 

Date. — "We have no printed copy of Julius Caesar earlier 
than that of the First Folio. Since it was not mentioned by 
Meres in 1598 and was alluded to in 1601 in John Weever's 
Mirrour of Martyrs, it probably appeared between those two 
dates. Weever says in his dedication that his work ' ' some two 
years ago was made fit for the print. ' ' This apparently means 
that he wrote the allusion to Julius Ccesar in 1599 and that 
consequently the play had been produced by then. There is a 
possible reference to it in Ben Jonson's Every Man Out of His 
Humour, which came out in 1599. Metrical tests and the gen- 
eral character of the play agree with these conclusions. Hence 
we can put the date between 1599-1601, with a preference for 
the former year. 

Sources. — Shakespeare drew his material from North's 
Plutarch, using the lives of Csesar, Brutus, and Antony. He has 



180 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

enlarged the parts of Casca and Lepidus, and made Brutus 
much, nobler than in the original. This last change was a dra- 
matic necessity in order to give the play a hero with whom we 
could sympathize. 

Hamlet. — On the surface the story of Hamlet is a 
comparatively simple oae. The young prince is heart- 
broken over the recent death of his father, and his 
mother's scandalously hasty marriage to Hamlet's 
uncle, the usurping sovereign. In this mood he is 
brought face to face with his father's spirit, told 
that his uncle was his father's murderer, and given 
as a sacred duty the task of revenging the crime. 
To this object he sacrifices all other aims in life — 
pleasure, ambition, and love. But this savage task is 
the last one on earth for which his fine-grained nature 
was fitted. He wastes his energy in feverish efforts 
which fail to accomplish his purpose, just as many 
a man wavers helplessly in trying to do something for 
which nature never intended him. Partly to deceive 
his enemies, partly to provide a freer expression for 
his pent-up emotions than the normal conditions of 
life would justify, he acts the role of one who is men- 
tally deranged. Finally, more by chance than any 
plan of his own, he achieves his revenge on the king, 
but not until he himself is mortally wounded. His 
story is the tragedy of a sensitive, refined, imaginative 
nature which is required to perform a brutal task in 
a brutal world. 

But around this story as a framework Shakespeare 
has woven such a wealth of poetry and philosophy that 
the play has been called the " tragedy of thought." It 
is in Hamlet's brain that the great action of the drama 



THE PLAYS OF THE THIRD PERIOD 181 

takes place ; the other characters are mere accessories 
and foils. Here we are brought face to face with the 
fear and mystery of the future life and the deepest 
problems of this. It is hardly true to say that Hamlet 
himself is a philosopher. He gives some very wise 
advice to the players ; but in the main he is grappling 
problems without solving them, peering into the dark, 
but bringing from it no definite addition to our knowl- 
edge. He represents rather the eternal questioning 
of the human heart when face to face with the great 
mysteries of existence; and perhaps this accounts 
largely for the wide and lasting popularity of the 
play. Side by side with this deep-souled, earnest 
man, moving in the shadow of the unseen, with his 
terrible duties and haunting fears, Shakespeare has 
placed in intentional mockery the old dotard Polonius, 
the incarnation of shallow worldly wisdom. 

No other play of Shakespeare's has called forth 
such a mass of comment as this or so many varied 
interpretations. Neither has any other roused a 
deeper interest in its readers. The spell which it 
casts over old and young alike is due partly to the 
character of the young prince himself, partly to the 
suggestive mystery with which it invests all problems 
of life and sorrow. 

Date. — ' A booke called the Eevenge of Hamlett ' was en- 
tered in the Stationers' Kegister July, 1602. Consequently, 
Shakespeare's Preliminary version, as represented by the First 
Quarto, though not printed until 1603, must have been written 
in or before the spring months of 1602 ; the second version 
1603-1604. 

Sources. — The plot came originally from the Historia Danica, 
a history of Denmark in Latin, written in the twelfth century 



182 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

by Saxo Grammaticus, a Danish scholar. About 1570 the story 
was retold in French in Belief orest's Histoires Tragiques. Be- 
sides his debt to Belief orest, it seems almost certain that Shake- 
speare drew from an earlier English tragedy of Hamlet by 
another man. This earlier play is lost ; but Nash, a contem- 
porary writer, alludes to it as early as 1589, and Henslowe's 
Diary records its performance in 1694. Somewhat before 1590, 
an early dramatist, Thomas Kyd, had written a play called 
The Spanish Tragedy, which, though far inferior to Shake- 
speare's Hamlet, resembled it in many ways. This likeness 
has caused scholars to suspect that Kyd wrote the early 
Hamlet ; and their suspicions are strengthened by an ambiguous 
and apparently punning allusion to JEsop's Kidde in the pas- 
sage by Nash mentioned above. A crude and brutal German 
play on the subject has been discovered, which is believed by 
many to be a translation of Kyd's original tragedy. If this 
is true, it shows how enormously Shakespeare improved on his 
source. 

Editions. — A very badly garbled and crude form of this play 
was printed in 1603, and is known as the First Quarto. A much 
better one, which contained most of the tragedy as we read it, 
appeared in 1604, and is called the Second Quarto. Several 
other quartos followed, for the play was exceedingly popular. 
The Folio omits certain passages found in the Second Quarto, 
and introduces certain new ones. Both the new passages and 
the omitted ones are included in modern editions ; so that, as 
has often been said, our modern Hamlet is longer than any 
Hamlet which Shakespeare left us. The First Quarto is gen- 
erally regarded as a pirated copy of Shakespeare's scenario, 
or first rough draft, of the play. 

Othello. — This play has often been called the trag- 
edy of jealousy, but that is a misleading statement. 
Othello, as Coleridge pointed out, is not a constitution- 
ally jealous man, such as Leontesin The Winter'' s Tale. 
His distrust of his wife is the natural suspicion of a 
man lost amid new and inexplicable surroundings. 



THE PLAYS OF THE THIRD PERIOD 183 

Women are proverbially suspicious in business, not be- 
cause nature made them so, but because, as they are in 
utter ignorance of standards by which to judge, they 
feel their helplessness in the face of deceit. Othello 
feels the same helplessness. Trained up in wars from 
his cradle, he could tell a true soldier from a traitor at 
a glance, with the calm confidence of a veteran ; but 
women and their motives are to him an uncharted 
sea. Suddenly a beautiful young heiress falls in love 
with him, and leaves home and friends to marry him. 
He stands on the threshold of a new realm, happy but 
bewildered. Then comes lago, his trusted subordinate, 
— who, as Othello knows, possesses that knowledge of 
women and of civilian life which he himself lacks, — and 
whispers in his ear that his bride is false to him ; that 
under this fair veneer lurks the eternal feminine as 
they had seen it in the common creatures of the camp ; 
that she has fooled her husband as these women have so 
often fooled his soldiers ; and that the rough-and-ready 
justice of the camp should be her reward. Had 
Othello any knowledge or experience in such matters 
to fall back on, he might anchor to that, and become 
definitely either the trusting husband or the Spartan 
judge. But as it is, he is whirled back and forth in a 
maelstrom of agonized doubt, until compass, bearings, 
and wisdom lost, he ends all in universal shipwreck. 

The character of lago is one of the subtlest studies 
of intelligent depravity ever created by man. Ostensi- 
bly his motive is revenge ; but in reality his wickedness 
seems due rather to a perverted mental activity, un- 
balanced by heart or conscience. As Napoleon en- 
joyed manoeuvring armies or Lasker studying chess, so 



184 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

lago enjoys the sense of his own mental power in 
handling his human pawns, in feeling himself master 
of the situation. If he ever had natural affections, 
they have been atrophied in the pursuit of this devilish 
game. 

With Desdemona the feminine element, which had 
been negligible in Julius Ccesar and thrown into the 
background in Hamlet, becomes a prominent feature, 
and remains so through the later tragedies. There is 
a pathetic contrast between the beautiful character of 
Desdemona and her undeserved fate, just as there is 
between the real nobility of Othello and the mad act 
by which he ruins his own happiness. For that 
reason this is perhaps the most touching of all Shake- 
speare's tragedies. 

Date. — The play was certainly published after 1601, for it 
contains several allusions to Holland's translation of the Latin 
author Pliny, which appeared in that year. Malone, one of the 
early editors of Shakespeare, says that Othello was acted at 
Hallowmas, 1604. We not know on what evidence he based this 
assertion ; but since the metrical tests all point to the same 
date, his statement is generally accepted. The First Quarto did 
not appear until 1622, six years after Shakespeare died and 
one year before the appearance of the First Folio. This was 
the only play published in quarto between Shakespeare's death 
and 1623. There are frequent oaths in the Quarto which have 
been very much modified in the Folio, and this strengthens our 
belief that the manuscript from which the Quarto was printed 
was written about 1604, for shortly after that date an act was 
passed against the use of profanity in plays. 

Sources. — The plot was taken from Giraldi Cinthio's Hec- 
atommithi (seventh novel of the third decade). A French trans- 
lation of the Italian was made in 1583-1584, and this Shakespeare 
may have used. We know of no English translation until 



THE PLAYS OF THE THIRD PERIOD 185 

years after Shakespeare died. Many details are changed in 
the play, and the whole story is raised to a far nobler plane. 
In the original the heroine is beaten to death with a stocking 
filled with sand ; Othello is tortured, but refuses to confess, and 
later is murdered by his wife's revengeful kinsmen. This crude, 
bloody^ and long-drawn-out story is in striking contrast with 
the masterly ending of the tragedy. 

King Lear. — As Romeo and Juliet shows the trag- 
edy of youth, so Lear shows the tragedy of old age. 
King Lear has probably been a good and able man in 
his day; but now time has impaired his judgment, 
and he is made to suffer fearfully for those errors for 
which nature, and not he, is to blame. Duped by the 
hypocritical smoothness of his two elder daughters, 
he gives them all his lands and power; while his 
youngest daughter Cordelia, who truly loves him, is 
turned away because she is too honest to humor an 
old man's whim. The result is what might have been 
expected. Lear has put himself absolutely into the 
power of his two older daughters, who are the very 
incarnation of heartlessness and ingratitude. By 
their inhuman treatment he is driven out into the 
night and storm, exposing his white head to a tempest 
so fierce that even the wild beasts refuse to face it. 
As a result of exposure and mental suffering, his mind 
becomes unhinged. At last his daughter Cordelia 
finds him, gives him refuge, and nurses him back to 
reason and hope. But this momentary gleam of light 
only makes darker by contrast the end which closely 
follows, where Cordelia is killed by treachery and 
Lear dies broken-hearted. 

The fate of Lear finds a parallel in that of Glouces- 



186 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

ter in the underplot. Like his king, this nobleman 
has proved an unwise father, favoring the treacherous 
child and disowning the true. He also is made to 
pay a fearful penalty for his mistakes, ending in his 
death. But he is represented as more justly punished, 
less excusable through the weaknesses of age; and 
for this reason his grief appeals to us as an intensify- 
ing reflection of Lear's misery rather than as a rival 
for that in our sympathy. The character of Edmund 
shows some likeness to that of Richard III; and a 
comparison of the two will show how Shakespeare has 
developed in the interval. Both are stern, able, and 
heartless ; but Edmund unites to these more complex 
feelings known only to the close student of life. 
Weakness and passion mingle in his love; supersti- 
tion and some faint, abortive motion of conscience 
unite to torment him when dying. 

There is a strangely lyric element about this great 
tragedy, an element of heart-broken emotion hovering 
on the edge of passionate song. It is like a great 
chorus in which the victims of treachery and ingrati- 
tude blend their denouncing cries. The tremulous 
voice of Lear rises terrible above all the others; and to 
his helpless curses the plaintive satire of the fool an- 
swers like a mocking echo in halls of former enjoyment. 
Thunder and lightning are the fearful accompaniment 
of the song ; and like faint antiphonal responses from 
the underplot come the voices of the wronged Edgar 
and the outraged Gloucester. 

Date. — The date of King Lear lies between 1603 and 1606. 
In 1603 appeared a book (Harsnett's Declaration of Egregious 
Popish Impostures) from which. Shakespeare afterward drew 



THE PLAYS OF THE THIRD PERIOD 187 

the names of the devils in the pretended ravings of Edgar, to- 
gether with similar details. In 1606, as we know from an 
entry in the Stationers' Register, the play was performed at 
Whitehall at Christmas. A late edition of the old King Leir 
(not Shakespeare's) was entered on the Register May 8, 1605 ; 
and it is very plausible that Shakespeare's tragedy was then 
having a successful run and that the old play was revived to 
take advantage of an occasion when its story was popular. 
Hence the date usually given for the composition of King Lear 
is 1604-5. A quarto, with a poor text, and carelessly printed, 
appeared in 1608 ; another, (bearing the assumed date of 1608) 
in 1619. The First Folio text is much the best. Three hundred 
lines lacking in it are made up for by a hundred lines absent 
from the quartos. 

Sources. — The story of Lear in some form or another had 
appeared in many writers before Shakespeare. The sources 
from which he drew chiefly were probably the early accounts 
by Geoffrey of Monmouth, a composite poem called The Mir- 
rourfor Magistrates., Holinshed's Chronicles, Spenser's Faerie 
Queene, and lastly an old play of Ki7ig Leir, supposed to be 
the one acted in 1594. This old play ended happily; Shake- 
speare first introduced the tragic ending. He also invented 
Lear's madness, the banishment and disguise of Kent, and the 
characters of Burgundy and the fool. The underplot he drew 
from the story of the blind king of Paphlagonia in Arcadia, 
a long, rambling novel of adventure by Sir Philip Sidney. 

Macbeth. — Macbeth, one of the great Scottish nobles 
of early times, is led, partly by his own ambition, partly 
by the instigation of evil supernatural powers, to murder 
King Duncan and usurp his place on the throne of Scot- 
land. In this bloody task he is aided and encouraged 
by his wife, a woman of powerful character, whose 
COD science is temporarily smothered by her frantic 
desire to advance her husband's career. We are forced 
to sympathize with this guilty pair, wicked as they 



188 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

are, because we are made to feel that they are not 
naturally criminals, that they are swept into crime by 
the misdirection of energies which, if directed along 
happier lines, might have been praiseworthy. Macbeth, 
vigorous and imaginative, has a poet's or conqueror's 
yearning toward a larger fullness of life, experience, 
joy. It is the woeful misdirection of this splendid 
energy through unlawful channels which makes him a 
murderer, not the callous, animal indifference of the 
born criminal. Similarly, his wife is a woman of great 
executive ability, reaching out instinctively for a field 
large enough in which to make that ability gain its 
maximum of accomplishment. Nature meant her for 
a queen; and it is the instinctive effort to find her 
natural sphere of action, — an effort common to all hu- 
manity — which blinds her conscience at the fatal mo- 
ment. Once entered on their career of evil, they find 
no chance for turning back. Suspicions are aroused, 
and Macbeth feels himself forced to guard himself from 
the effects of the first. The ghosts of his victims haunt 
his guilty conscience; his wife dies heart-broken with 
remorse which comes too late ; and he himself is killed 
in battle by his own rebellious countrymen. 

Between the characters of Macbeth and his wife the 
dramatist has drawn a subtle but vital distinction. 
Macbeth is an unprincipled but imaginative man, with 
a strong tincture of reverence and awe. Hitherto he 
has been restrained in the straight path of an upright 
life by his respect for conventions. When once that 
barrier is broken down, he has no purely moral check 
in his own nature to replace it, and rushes like a flood, 
with ever growing impetus, from crime to crime. His 



THE PLAYS OF THE THIRD PERIOD 189 

wife, on the other hand, has a conscience; and con- 
science, unlike awe for conventions, can be temporarily 
suppressed, but not destroyed. It reawakes when the 
first great crime is over, drives the unhappy queen from 
her sleepless couch night after night, and hounds her 
at last to death. 

This is the shortest of all Shakespeare's plays in 
actual number of lines ; and no other work of his reveals 
such condensation and lightning-like rapidity of move- 
ment. It is the tragedy of eager ambition, which allows 
a man no respite after the first fatal mistake, but hurries 
him on irresistibly through crime after crime to the 
final disaster. Over all, like a dark cloud above a 
landscape, hovers the presence of the supernatural be- 
ings who are training on the sinful but unfortunate 
monarch to his ruin. 

Authorship. — The speeches of Hecate and the dialogue con- 
nected with them in III, v and IV, i, 39-47 are suspected by- 
many to be the work of Thomas Middleton, a well-known con- 
temporary playwright. They are unquestionably inferior to 
most of the play. Messrs. Clark and Wright have assigned 
several other passages to Middleton ; but these are now gen- 
erally regarded as Shakespeare's, and some of them are consid- 
ered as by no means below his usual high level. 

Date. — We find no copy of Macbeth earlier than the First 
Folio. It was certainly written before 1610, however ; for Dr. 
Si a) on Forman saw it acted that year and records the fact in his 
Booke of Plaies. The allusion to " two-fold balls and treble 
sceptres " (IV, i, 121) shows that the play was written after 1603 
when James I became king of both Scotland and England. So 
does the allusion to the habit of touching for the king's evil (IV, 
iii, 140-159), — a custom which James revived. The reference 
to an equivocator in the porter's soliloquy (H, iii) may allude 
to Henry Garnet, who was tried in 1606 for complicity in the 



190 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

famous Gunpowder Plot, and who is said to have upheld the 
doctrine of equivocation. The date of composition is usually 
placed 1605-6. 

Sources. — The plot is borrowed from Holinshed's Historie of 
Scotland. Most of the material is taken from the part relating 
to the reigns of Duncan and Macbeth ; but other incidents, such 
as the drugging of the grooms, are from the murder of Duncan's 
ancestor Duffe, which is described in another part of Holinshed. 

Antony and Cleopatra. — There is no other passion 
in mankind, which makes such fools of wise men, such 
weaklings of brave ones, as that of sinful love. For 
this very reason it is the most tragic of all human 
passions ; and from this comes the dramatic power of 
Antony and Cleopatra. The ruin of a contemptible 
man is never impressive ; but the ruin of an imposing 
character like Antony's through the one weak spot in 
his powerful nature has all the somber impressiveness 
of a burning city or some other great disaster. 

Like Julius Coesar, this play is founded on Roman 
history. It begins in Egypt with a picture of Antony 
fascinated by the Egyptian queen. The urgent needs 
of the divided Roman world call him away to Italy. 
Here, once free of Cleopatra's presence, he becomes his 
old self, a reveler, yet diplomatic and self-seeking. 
From motives of policy he marries Octavia, sister of 
Octavius Caesar, and for a brief space seems assured 
of a brilliant future. But the old spell draws him 
back. He returns to Cleopatra, and Octavius in re- 
venge for Octavia's wrongs makes war upon him. 
Cleopatra proves still Antony's evil genius. Her se- 
duction has already drawn him into war; now her 
cowardice in the crisis of the battle decides the war 



THE PLAYS OF THE THIRD PERIOD 191 

against Mm. From that point tlie fate of both is one 
headlong rush to inevitable ruin. 

In the character of Cleopatra, Shakespeare has made 
a wonderful study of the fascination which beauty and 
charm exert, even when coupled with moral worth- 
lessness. We do not love her, we do not pity her when 
she dies ; but we feel that in spite of her idle love of 
power and pleasure, she has given life a richer mean- 
ing. We are fascinated by her as by some beautiful 
poison plant, the sight of which causes an aesthetic 
thrill, its touch, disease and death. 

Powerful as is this play, and in many ways tragic, it 
by no means stirs our sympathies as do Macbeth, King 
Lear, and Othello. Sin for Antony and Cleopatra is 
not at all the unmixed cup of woe which it proves for 
Macbeth and his lady. Here at the end the lovers 
pay the price of lust and folly ; but before paying that 
price, they have had its adequate equivalent in the 
voluptuous joy of life. Moreover, death loses half its 
terrors for Antony through the very military vigor of 
his character ; and for Cleopatra, because of the cunning 
which renders it painless. What impresses us most is 
not the pathos of their fate, but rather the sublime 
folly with which, deliberately and open-eyed, they 
barter a world for the intoxicating joy of passion. 
Impulsive as children, powerful as demigods, they 
made nations their toys, and life and death a game. 
Prudence could not rob them of that heritage of delight 
which they considered their natural birthright, nor 
death, when it came, undo what they had already en- 
joyed. Folly on so superhuman a scale becomes, in 
the highest sense of the word, dramatic. 



192 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

Date. — In May, 1608, there was entered in the Stationers' 
Register ' A Book called Antony and Cleopatra ' ; and this was 
probably the play under discussion. The internal evidence 
agrees with this ; hence the date is usually set at 1607-8. In 
spite of the above entry, the book does not appear to have been 
printed at that time ; and the first copy which has come down 
to us is that in the 1623 Folio. 

Sources. — Shakespeare's one source appears to have been 
the Life of Marcus Antonius in North's Plutarch; and he 
followed that very closely. The chief changes in the play con- 
sist in the omission of certain events which would have clogged 
the dramatic action. 

Coriolanus. — Here follows the tragedy of over- 
weening pride. The trouble with Coriolanus is not 
ambition, as is the case with Macbeth. He cares little 
for crowns, oflBce, or any outward honor. Self-centered, 
self-sufficient, contemptuous of all mankind outside of 
his own immediate circle of friends, he dies at last be- 
cause he refuses to recognize those ties of sympathy 
which should bind all men and all classes of men to- 
gether. He leads his countrymen to battle, and shows 
great courage at the siege of Corioli. On his return he 
becomes a candidate for consul. But to win this office, 
he must conciliate the common people whom he holds 
in contempt ; and instead of conciliating them, he so 
exasperates them by his overbearing scorn that he is 
driven out of Rome. With the savage vindictiveness 
characteristic of insulted pride, he joins the enemies of 
his country, brings Rome to the edge of ruin, and spares 
her at last only at the entreaties of his mother. Then 
he returns to Corioli to be killed there by treachery. 

Men like Coriolanus are not lovable, either in real 
life or fiction; but, despite his faults, he commands 



THE PLAYS OF THE THIRD PERIOD 193 

our admiration in his success, and our sympathy in 
his death. We must remember that ancient Rome 
had never heard our new doctrine of the freedom and 
equality of man ; that the common people, as drawn 
by Shakespeare, were objects of contempt and just 
cause for exasperation. Again, we must remember 
that if Coriolanus had a high opinion of himself, he 
also labored hard to deserve it. He was full of the 
French spirit of noblesse oblige. Cruel, arrogant, 
harsh, he might be ; but he was never cowardly, under- 
handed, or mean. He was a man whose ideals were 
better than his judgment, and whose prejudiced view 
of life made his character seem much worse than it 
was. The lives of such men are usually tragic. 

Date. — The play was not printed until the appearance of the 
First Folio, and external evidence as to its date is almost worth- 
less. On the strength of internal evidence, meter, style, etc., 
which mark it unquestionably as a late play, it is usually as- 
signed to 1609. 

Sources. — Shakespeare's source was Plutarch's Life of Corio- 
lanus (North's translation) . As in Julius Ccesar and Antony 
and Cleopatra, he followed Plutarch closely. 

Timon of Athens. — As Coriolanus was the tragedy 
of a man who is too self-centered, so Timon is the 
tragedy of a man who is not self-centered enough. 
His good and bad traits alike, generosity and extrava- 
gance, friendship and vanity, combine to make him 
live and breathe in the attitude of other men toward 
him. From this comes his unbounded prodigality by 
which in a few years he squanders an enormous for- 
tune in giving pleasure to his friends. From this lack 
of self-poise, too, comes the tremendous reaction later, 
o 



194 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

when he learns that his imagined world of love and 
friendship and popular applause was a mirage of the 
desert, and finds himself poverty-stricken and alone, 
the dupe of sharpers, the laughing-stock of fools. 

Yet in spite of his lack of balance, he is full of 
noble qualities. Apemantus has the very thing which 
he lacks, yet Apemantus is contemptible beside him. 
The churlish philosopher is like some dingy little 
scow, which rides out the tempest because the small 
cargo which it has is all in its hold ; Timon is like 
some splendid, but top-heavy, battleship, which turns 
turtle in the storm through lack of ballast. There is 
something lionlike and magnificent, despite its un- 
reason, in the way he accepts the inevitable, and later, 
after the discovery of the gold, spurns away both the 
chance of wealth and the human jackals whom it at- 
tracts. The same lordly scorn persists after him in 
the epitaph which he leaves behind : — 

" Here He I, Timon ; who alive all living men did hate. 
Pass by and curse thy fill, but pass, and stay not here thy 
gait. ' ' 

Yet this very epitaph of the dead misanthrope shows 
the same lack of self-sufficiency which characterized 
the living Timon. He despises the opinion of men, 
but he must let them know that he despises it. Corio- 
lanus would have laughed at them from Elysium and 
scorned to write any epitaph. 

No other Shakespearean play, with the exception of 
Troilus and Cressida, shows the human race in a light 
so contemptible as this. Aside from Timon and his 
faithful steward, there is not one person in the play 



THE PLAYS OF THE THIRD PERIOD 195 

who seems to have a single redeeming trait. All of 
the others are selfish, and most of them are treacher- 
ous and cowardly. 

Authorship. — It is geDerally believed that some parts of the 
play are not by Shakespeare, although opinion is still somewhat 
divided as to what is and is not his. The scenes and parts of 
scenes in which Apemantus and some of the minor characters 
appear are most strongly suspected. 

Date. — This play was not printed until the publication of the 
First Folio, and the only evidence which we have for its date is 
in the meter and style and in the fact that some of the speeches 
show a strong resemblance to certain ones in King Lear. The 
date most generally approved is 1607-8. 

Sources. — The direct source was probably a short account of 
Timon in Plutarch's Life of Marcus Antonius. The same story 
also appears in Painter's Palace of Pleasure^ where Shake- 
speare may have read it. Both of these accounts, however, con- 
tain but a small part of the material found in the play. Certain 
details missing in them, such as the discovery of the gold, etc., 
are found in Timon or the Misanthrope, a dialogue by Lucian, 
one of the later of the ancient Greek writers. As far as we 
know, Lucian had not been translated into English at this time; 
but there were copies of his works in Latin, French, and Italian. 
"We cannot say whether Shakespeare had read them or not. In 
1842 a play on Timon was printed from an old manuscript which 
is supposed to have been written about 1600. This contains a 
banquet scene, a faithful steward, and the finding of the gold. 
This has the appearance of an academic play rather than one 
meant for the public theaters, so it is probable that Shakespeare 
never heard of it ; but it is barely possible that he knew it and 
used it as a source. 

The most helpful book yet written on the period is : Shake- 
spearean Tragedy, by A. C. Bradley (London, Macmillan, 1910 
(1st ed. 1904)). 



CHAPTER XIII 

THE PLAYS OF THE FOURTH PERIOD ROMANTIC 

TRAGI-COMEDY 

No less clear than the interest in tragic themes 
which attracted the London audiences for the half-a- 
dozen years following 1600, is the shifting of popular ap- 
proval towards a new form of drama about 1608. This 
was the romantic tragi-comedy, a type of drama which 
puts a theme of sentimental interest into events and 
situations that come close to the tragic. Shakespeare's 
plays of this type are often called romances, since they 
tell a story of the same type found in romantic novels of 
the time. His plays contain rather less of the tragic, 
and more of fanciful and playful humor than do the 
plays of the other famous masters in this type. Beau-' 
mont and Fletcher; his characters are rather more 
lifelike and appealing. 

While the tragi-comedies of Beaumont and Fletcher, 
which were written from 1609 to 1611, have been 
shown to have influenced Shakespeare in his romances, 
yet in several ways they are very different. The work 
of Beanmont and Fletcher tells of court intrigue and 
exaggerated passions of hatred, envy, and lust ; Shake- 
speare's plays tell of out-of-door adventures, and the 
restoration and reconciliation of families and friends 
parted by misfortune. Fletcher contriver well-con- 

196 



THE PLAYS OF THE FOURTH PERIOD 197 

structed plots, depending, indeed, rather too much on 
incident and situation for effect ; Shakespeare chooses 
for his plots stories which possess only slight unity 
of theme, and depends upon character and atmosphere 
for his appeal. Thus the romances of Shakespeare 
stand out as a strongly marked part of his work, dif- 
ferent in treatment from the plays of his rivals which 
perhaps suggested his use of this form. Here, as 
everywhere, Shakespeare exhibits complete mastery of 
the form in which he works. 

In addition to the romances of this period, Shake- 
speare had some share in the undramatic and belated 
chronicle play. The Life of Henry the Eighth, most of 
which is assigned to John Fletcher. In looseness of 
construction, in the emphasis on character in distress, 
and in the introduction of a masque, as well as in other 
ways, this play resembles the tragi-comedies of the 
period rather than any earlier chronicle. Thus the 
term '^romantic tragi-comedy '^ may be properly used 
to describe all the work of the Fourth Period. 

Pericles, Prince of Tyre, was probably the earliest, as 
it is certainly the weakest, of the dramatic romances. 
But the story was one of the most popular in all fiction, 
and Pericles was, no doubt, in its time what its first 
title-page claimed for it, a ' much-admired play.' Its 
hero is a wandering knight of chivalry, buffeted by 
storm and misfortune from one shore to another. The 
five acts which tell his adventures are like five islands, 
widely separated, and washed by great surges of good 
and ill luck. The significance of his daughter's name, 
Marina, is intensified for us when we realize that in 
this play the sea is not only her birthplace, but is the 



198 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

symbol throughout of Fortune and Romance. From 
the polluted coast of Antioch, where Pericles reads 
the vile King his riddle and escapes, past Tarsus, 
where he assists Creon, the governor of a helpless city, 
to Pentapolis, where, shipwrecked and a stranger, he 
wins the tournament and the hand of the Princess 
Thaisa, the waves of chance carry the Prince. They 
overwhelm him in the great storm which robs him of 
his wife, and gives him his little Marina ; but they bear 
the unconscious Thaisa safely to land, and in after 
years their wild riders, the pirates, save Marina from 
death at the hands of Creon, and bring her to Mitylene. 
Here, upon his storm-bound ship, the mourning 
Pericles recovers his daughter ; and at Ephesus, near 
by, the waves give back his wife, through the kind in- 
fluence of Diana, their goddess. We are never far 
from the sound of the shore, and the lines of the play 
we best recall are those that tell of " humming water " 
and " the rapture of the sea." 

Pericles in its original scheme was a play of adventure 
rather than a dramatic romance. The first two acts, 
in which Shakespeare could have had no hand, are 
disjointed and ineffective. To help out the stage 
action, Shakespeare's collaborator introduced John 
Gower, the mediaeval poet, as a " Prologue," to the acts. 
He was supplemented, when his affectedly antique 
diction failed him, by dumb show, the last straw 
clutched at by the desperate playwright. But at the 
beginning of Act III the master's music swells out 
with no uncertain note, and we are lifted into the upper 
regions of true dramatic poetry as Pericles speaks to 
the storm at sea : — 



THE PLAYS OF THE FOURTH PERIOD 199 

" Thou god of this great vast, rebuke these surges 
Which wash both heaven and hell ; and thou that hast 
Upon the winds command, bind them in brass, 
Having call'd them from the deep ! . . . 

The seaman's whistle 
Is as a whisper in the ears of death, 
Unheard." 

In the shipwreck which follows, some phrases of which 
anticipate the similar scene in The Tempest; in the 
character of Marina, girlish and fair as Perdita ; in 
the grave physician Cerimon, whose arts are scarcely 
less potent than Prospero's ; in the grieving Pericles, 
who, like remorse-stricken Leontes, recovers first his 
daughter, then his wife, we see the first sketches of 
the most interesting elements in the dramatic romances 
which are to follow. Throughout all this Shakespeare 
is manifest ; and even in those scenes which depict 
Marina's misery in Mytilene and subsequent rescue, 
there is little more than the revolting nature of the 
scenes to bid us reject them as spurious, while Marina's 
speeches in them are certainly true to the Shake- 
spearean conception of her character. 

Authorship and Date. — The play was entered to Edward Blount 
in the Stationers' Register, May 20, 1608. It was probably 
written but little before. Quartos appeared in 1609, 1611, 1619, 
1630, and 1635. It was not included among Shakespeare's works 
until the Third Folio (1664). The publishers of the First Folio 
may have left it out on the ground that it was spurious, or be- 
cause of some difficulty in securing the printing rights. The 
former of these hypotheses is generally favored, since, as we 
have said, a study of the play reveals the apparent work of an- 
other author, particularly in Acts I and II, and the earlier speech 
of Gower, the Chorus in the play. In 1608 a novel was pub- 



200 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

listed., called "The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prince of 
Tyre. Being the true History of the Play of Pericles, as it was 
lately presented by the worthy and ancient poet John Gower.'* 
The author was George Wilkins, a playwright of some ability. 
He is generally accepted as Shakespeare's collaborator. The 
claims of William Rowley for a share in the scenes of low life 
have little foundation. 

Source. — Shakespeare used Gower's Confessio Amantis, and 
the version in Laurence Twine's Pattern of Painful Adventures, 
1606. The tale is also in the Gesta Bomanorum. 

Cymbeline. — "A father cruel, and a step-dame false, 
A foolish suitor to a wedded lady. 
That hath her husband banish' d." 

Thus Imogen, the heroine of the play , and the daughter 
of Cymbeline, king of Britain, describes her own con- 
dition at the beginning of the story. The theme of 
the long and complicated tale that follows is her fidelity 
under this affliction. Neither her father's anger, nor the 
stealthy deception of the false stepmother, nor the base 
lust of her brutish half-brother Cloten, nor the seductive 
tongue of the villainous Italian lachimo, her husband's 
friend ; nor even the knowledge of her own husband's 
sudden suspicion of her, and his instructions to have 
her slain, shake in the least degree her true affection. 
Such constancy cannot fail of its reward, and in the 
end Imogen wins back both father and husband. 

In such a story, where virtue's self is made to shine, 
other characters must of necessity suffer. Posthumus, 
Imogen's husband, appears weak and impulsive, foolish 
in making his wife's constancy a matter for wagers, 
and absurdly quick to believe the worst of her. His 
weakness is, however, in part atoned for by his gallant 
fight in defense of his native Britain, and by his out- 



THE PLAYS OF THE FOURTH PERIOD 201 

burst of genuine shame and remorse when perception 
of his unjust treatment of Imogen comes to him. Cym- 
beline, the aged king, has all the irascibility of Lear, 
with none of his tenderness. The wicked Queen and 
her son are purely wicked. Only the faithful servant, 
Pisanio, a minor figure, has our sympathy in this court 
group. 

But in the exiled noble Belarius, and the two sons 
of Cymbeline whom he has stolen in infancy and brought 
up with him in a wild life in the mountains, single- 
hearted nobility rules. When Imogen, disguised as a 
page, in her flight from the court to Posthumus comes 
upon them, there is the instant sympathy of noble 
minds, and there is a brief respite from her misfortunes. 
They rid her of the troublesome Cloten, and their 
victory over Rome brings to book the intriguing lachimo 
and accomplishes her final recovery of love and honor. 
A reading of the play leaves as the brightest picture 
upon the memory their joy at meeting Imogen, and 
their grief when the potion she drinks robs them of 
her. In them we find expressed that noble simplicity 
which romanticists have always associated with true 
children of nature. 

To Imogen, who has a far longer part to play than 
any other of Shakespeare's heroines, the poet has also 
given a completer characterization, in which every 
charm of the highest type of woman is delineated. The 
one trait which a too censorious audience might criticize, 
that meekness in unbearable affliction which makes 
Chaucer's patient Griselda almost incomprehensible to 
modern readers, is in Imogen completely redeemed by 
her resolution in the face of danger, and by a certain 



202 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

imperiousness which well becomes the daughter of a 
king. 

Authorship. — Some later hand probably made up the vision of 
Posthumus (V, iv, 30-90), where a series of irregular stanzas 
of inferior poetical merit are inserted to form " an apparition." 

Date. — Simon Forman, the writer of a diary, who died in 
1611, describes the performance of Cymbeline at which he was 
present. The entry occurs between those telling of Macbeth 
(April 20, 1610) and The Winter's Tale (May 15, 1611). The 
tests of verse assign it also to this period. The first print was 
that of the First Folio, 1623. 

Source. — From Holinshed Shakespeare learned the only actual 
historical fact in the play, that one Cunobelinus was an ancient 
king of Britain. Cymbeline's two sons are likewise from Hol- 
inshed, as is the rout of an army by a countryman and his two 
sons ; but the two stories are separate. The ninth novel of the 
second day of the Decameron of Boccaccio tells a story much 
resembling the part of the play which concerns Posthumus. 
The play called The Bare Triumphs of Love and Fortune (1589) 
contains certain characters not unlike Imogen, Posthumus, 
Belarius, and Cloten, Fidelia, Imogen's name in disguise, is 
the heroine's name. But direct borrowing cannot be proved. 

The Winter's Tale. — Nowhere is Shakespeare more 
lavish of his powers of characterization and of poetic 
treatment of life than in this play. He found for his 
plot a popular romance of the time, in which a true 
queen, wrongly accused of infidelity with her husband's 
friend, dies of grief at the death of her son, while her 
infant daughter, abandoned to the seas in a boat, 
grows up among shepherds to marry the son of the 
king of whom her father had been jealous. Disregard- 
ing the essentially undramatic nature of the story, 
as well as its improbabilities, he achieved a signal tri- 



THE PLAYS OF THE FOURTH PERIOD 203 

umph of his art in the creation of his two heroines, 
and in his conception of the pastoral scenes, so fresh, 
joyous, and absolutely free from the artificiality of 
convention. 

In the deeply wronged queen he drew the supreme 
portrait of woman's fortitude. Hermione is brave, not 
by nature, but inspired by high resolve for her honor 
and for her children. Nobly indignant at the slanders 
uttered against her, her wifely love forgives the 
slanderer in pity for the blindness of unreason which has 
caused his action. Shakespeare's dramatic instinct 
made him alter Hermione's death in the earlier story 
to life in secret, with poetic justice in store. Artificial 
as the long period of waiting seems, before the final 
reconciliation takes place, it is forgotten in the mag- 
nificent appeal of the mother's love when the lost 
daughter kneels in joy before her. 

In Perdita, Shakespeare, with incredible skill, 
depicted the true daughter of such a mother. Al- 
though her nature at first seems all innocence, beauty, 
youth, and joy, yet when trial comes to her in the 
knowledge that she, a shepherdess, has loved a king's 
son, and that his father has discovered it, her courage 
rises with the danger, and her words echo her mother's 
resolution : — 

" I think afifliction may subdue the cheek, 
But not take in the mind." 

In the pastoral scenes, the poet gives us an English 
sheepshearing, with its merrymaking, a pair of honest 
English country fellows in the old shepherd and his son, 
the Clown, and the greatest of all beloved vagabonds 



204 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

in the rogue Autolycus, whose vices, like Falstaff's, 
are more lovable than other people's virtues. Fortune, 
which will not suffer him to be honest, makes his 
thieveries, in her extremity of whim, to be but bene- 
fits for others. 

Of the other characters. Prince Morizel, Perdita's 
lover, is that rarest of all dramatic heroes, a young 
prince with real nobility of soul. Lord Camillo and 
Lady Paulina are well-drawn types of loyalty and de- 
votion. Leontes alone, the jealous husband, is unrea- 
soning in the violence of his jealousy. As the study 
of a mind overborne by an obsession, it is a strong 
yet repulsive picture. 

Date. — Simon Forman narrates in his diary how he saw the 
play at the Globe Theater, May 15, 1611. It was probably 
written about this time. Jonson's Masque of Oberon, produced 
January 1, 1611, contains an antimasque of satyrs which may 
bear some relation to the similar dance in IV, iv, 331 f£. The 
First Folio contains the earliest print of the play. 

Source. — The romance, to which reference has been made 
above, as the source of The Winter'' s Tale^ was Robert Greene's 
Pandosto : The Triumph of Time, sometimes called by its later 
title, The History of Dorastus and Fawnia. Fourteen editions 
followed one another from its appearance in 1588. Greene 
made the jealous Pandosto king in Bohemia, and Egistus (Pol- 
ixenes in the play) king of Sicily. In The Winter'' s Tale two 
kingdoms are interchanged. Nevertheless the " seacoast of 
Bohemia," so often ridiculed as Shakespeare's stage direction, 
is found in Greene's story. Three alterations by Shakespeare are 
of vital importance in improving the plot : the slandered queen 
is kept alive, instead of dying in grief for her son's death, to be 
restored again in the famous but theatrical statue scene ; Au- 
tolycus is created and is given, with Camillo, an important share 
in the restoration of Perdita ; and the complications of Doras- 



THE PLAYS OF THE FOURTH PERIOD 205 

tus's (Florizel's) destiny as the prospective husband of a princess 
of Denmark, and Pandosto's (Leontes's) falling in love with his 
own daughter and his suicide on learning of her true birth, are 
wisely omitted. The characters of Paulina, the Clown, and 
some minor persons are Shakespeare's own invention. 

According to Professor Neilson, Autolycus and his song in IV 
iii, 1 ff. , may have been partly based on the character of Tom 
Beggar in Robert Wilson's Three Ladies of London (1584). 

The Tempest, probably the last complete drama from 
Shakespeare's pen, differs from the other " romances " 
in possessing a singular unity. It comes, indeed 
closer than any play, save the Comedy of Errors, to 
fulfilling the demands of unity of action, time, and 
place. This may be due to the fact that the poet is 
here making up his own plot, not, as in other cases, 
dramatizing a novel of extended adventure. 

The central theme of The Tempest is, like that of the 
other romances, restoration of those exiled and recon- 
ciliation of those at enmity ; but the treatment of the 
story could not be more different. Where the chance of 
fortune has hitherto brought about the happy ending, 
here magic and the supernatural in control of man are 
the means employed. Those who had plotted or con- 
nived at the expulsion of Prospero, Duke of Milan, 
and his being set adrift in an open boat, with his 
infant daughter and his books for company, are 
wrecked through his art upon the island of which he 
has become the master. Ariel, the spirit who serves 
Prospero, a mysterious, over changing form, now fire, 
now a Nymph, now an invisible musician, now a 
Harpy, striking guilt into the conscience (and yet ap- 
parently not interested in either vice or virtue, but 



206 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

longing only for free idleness), guides all to Prosperous 
cave, and receives freedom for his toil. His spirit 
pervades every scene, whether we view the king's son 
Ferdinand loving innocent Miranda, or the silent king 
mourning his son's loss, or the guilty conspirators 
plotting the king's death, or the drunken steward and 
jester plotting with the servant monster Caliban the 
overthrow of Prospero. All of them are led, by the 
wisdom of Prospero acting through Ariel, away from 
their own wrong impulses, and into reconcilement and 
peace. How much of TIiq Tempest Shakespeare meant 
as a symbol can never be told ; but here, perhaps, as 
much as anywhere the temptation to read the phi- 
losophy of the poet into the story of the dramatist 
comes strongly upon the reader. 

There are two speeches of Prospero, in particular, 
where the reader is inclined to believe he is listening 
to Shakespeare's own voice. In one, Prospero puts 
a sudden end to his pageant of the spirits, and com- 
pares life itself to the transitory play. In the other, 
Prospero bids farewell to his magic art. These are 
often interpreted as Shakespeare's own farewell to the 
stage and to his art, — with what justification every 
reader must decide for himself. 

In this last play there is, it should be said, not 
the slightest hint of a weakening of the poetic or the 
dramatic faculty. The falling in love of Miranda, the 
vp-onderful and wondering child of purity and nature ; 
the tempting of Sebastian by the crafty Antonio; and 
the creation of Caliban, half-man, half-devil, with his 
elemental know^ledge of nature, and his dull cunning, 
and his stunted faculties, — all these are the work of 



THE PLAYS OF THE FOURTH PERIOD 207 

a genius still in tlie full pride of power. Shakespeare's 
dramatic work ends suddenly, " like a bright exhala- 
tion in the evening." 

Date. — Edmund Malone's word, unsupported by other evi- 
dence, puts the play as already in existence in the autumn of 
1611. The play certainly is later than the wreck of Somers's 
ship, in 1609. It was acted during the marriage festivities of 
the Princess Elizabeth in 1613, when other plays were revived. 

Sources. — Two accounts by Sylvester Jourdan and William 
Strachey told, soon after the event, of the casting away upon 
the Bermuda Islands of a ship belonging to the Virginia expe- 
dition of Somers in 609. From these Shakespeare drew for 
many details. His island, however, is clearly not Bermuda, 
nor, indeed, any known laud. Other details have been traced 
from various sources. Ariel is a name of a spirit in mediaeval 
literature of cabalistic secrets. Montaigne's ^ssays^ translated 
by Florio (1603), furnished the hint of Gonzalo's imaginary 
commonwealth (II, i, 147 ff.). Setebos has been found as a 
devil-god of the Patagonians in Eden's History of Travaile 
(1577). The rest of the story, which is nine-tenths of the 
whole, is probably Shakespeare's own, though the central theme 
of an exiled prince, whose daughter marries his enemy, who has 
an attendant spirit, and who through magic compels the cap- 
tive prince to carry logs, may come from some old folk tale ; 
since a German play. Die Schone Sidea, by Jakob Ayrer of 
Nuremberg (died 1605), possesses all these details. The rela- 
tions, if any, between the two plays are remote. 

The Life of Henry the Eighth, the last of the historical 
plays, in date of composition as in the history it pic- 
tures, suffers from the very fact that it boasts in its 
second title, All is True. The play might have been 
built around any one of the half-dozen persons which 
in turn claim our chief interest, — Buckingham, Queen 
Katherine, Anne Bullen, the King, Wolsey, or Cran- 



208 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

mer; but fidelity to history, while it did not hinder 
some slight alteration of incident and time, required 
that each of these should in turn be distinguished, if a 
complete picture of the times of Henry VIII were to 
be given. The result was a complete abandonment of 
anything like unity of theme. 

It is, of course, a disappointment to one who has 
just read / Henry IV. On the other hand, this play 
may be regarded as a kind of pageant, as the word is 
used nowadays in England and America. It presents, 
in the manner of a modern pageant, a series of brilliant 
scenes telling of Buckingham's fall, of Wolsey's triumph 
and ruin, of Katherine's trial and death, of Anne 
Bullen's coronation, and of Cranmer's advancement, 
joined together by the well-drawn character of the 
King, powerful, masterful, selfish, and vindictive, but 
not without a suggestion of better qualities. The 
gayety of the Masque, in the first act, where King 
Henry first meets Anne Bullen, is also in perfect har- 
mony with the modern pageant, which always employs 
music and dancing as aids to the picture. 

In Queen Katherine we have a suffering and wronged 
woman, gifted with queenly grace and dignity, and 
with strong sympathies and a keen sense of justice. 
From her first entrance, when she ventures. Esther- 
like, into the presence of the king to intercede for an 
oppressed people, through all her vain struggle against 
the King's wayward inclination and the Cardinal's 
wiles, up to the very moment when she is stricken 
with mortal illness, she holds our sympathy. If in 
her great trial scene she is weaker and more impulsive 
than Hermione in hers, yet the circumstances are 



THE PLAYS OF THE FOURTH PERIOD 209 

different ; she is not keyed up to so higli an endeavor 
as that lady, nor in so much danger for herself or her 
children. 

Authorship. — Differences in style and meter, and the frag- 
mentary quality of the whole play have long confirmed the 
theory that Shakespeare in Henry VIII engaged in a very 
loose sort of collaboration. Only the Buckingham scene (I, i,), 
the scenes of Katherine's entrance and trial (I, ii, II, iv), a 
brief scene of Anne Bullen (II, iii), and the first half of the 
scene in which Wolsey's schemes are exposed and Henry alien- 
ated from him (III, i, 1-203) are confidently ascribed to Shake- 
speare. The rest of the play fits best the style and metrical 
habit of John Fletcher, at this time one of the most popular 
dramatists of London. 

Date. — The Globe Theater was burned on June 29, 1613, 
when a play called Henry VIII or All is True was being per- 
formed. So far as stylistic tests can decide, this was not long 
after the composition of the play. Sir Henry Wotton, the anti- 
quarian, writing from hearsay knowledge, says that the play 
being acted at the time of the fire was " a new play called All 
is True.'''' Shakespeare's scenes in this drama may thus have 
been his last dramatic work. A praise of King James in the 
last scene was probably written not later than the rest of the 
play, and thus insures a date later than 1603. The earliest print 
of the play was the First Folio, 1623. 

Source. — Holinshed was the chief source. Halle furnished 
certain details. Foxe's Book of Martyrs tells the Cranmer 
story. 



CHAPTER XIV 

FAMOUS MISTAKES AND DELUSIONS ABOUT SHAKE- 
SPEARE 

The mystery which enwraps so much of Shake- 
speare's life, combined with the interest which natu- 
rally centers around a great genius, is ideally calculated 
to stimulate human imagination to fantastic guess- 
work. It is probably for this reason that a number 
of famous delusions about Shakespeare have at different 
times arisen. Some of these are of sufficient impor- 
tance to deserve attention. Three widely different 
types of mistakes can be observed. 

The Shakespeare Apocrypha. — The most excusable of 
these delusions was the belief that Shakespeare wrote 
a large number of plays which are now known to be 
the work of other men. Some of these plays were 
printed, either during the poet's life or after his death, 
with " William Shakespeare " or " W. S." on the title- 
page. It is now practically certain that the full name 
was a printer's forgery, and that the letters W. S. were 
either designed to deceive or else the initials of some 
contemporary dramatist (such as Wentworth Smith, for 
example). Six of these spurious dramas were included 
in the Third Folio of Shakespeare's complete works. 
Since this came out forty years after the First Folio, 
when men who had known Shakespeare personally 

210 



DELUSIONS ABOUT SHAKESPEARE 211 

were dead, we certainly cannot believe that its editor 
had better information than those of the First 
Folio, who were the poet's personal friends, and who 
did not include these plays. The spui;ious dramas 
printed in the Third Folio were : The London Prodigal, 
The History of the Life and Death of Thomas Lord 
Cromwell, The History of Sir John Oldcastle, TJie Pur- 
itan Widow, Yorkshire Tragedy, and The Tragedy of 
Locrine. 

Among the other plays imputed to Shakespeare at 
various times are : Fair Em, The Merry Devil of Ed- 
mo7iton, Arden of Feversham, The Two Noble Kinsmen, 
Edward Third, and Sir Thomas More. Some good 
critics, chiefly literary men, not scholars, still believe 
that Shakespeare wrote parts of the last three ; but it 
is practically certain that he had nothing to do with 
the others, and his part in all these disputed plays is 
extremely doubtful. 

Shakespearean Forgeries. — Men who assigned the 
above spurious plays to Shakespeare made an honest 
error of judgment, but other men have committed de- 
liberate forgeries in regard to him. At the end of the 
eighteenth century, W. H. Ireland forged papers which 
he attempted to impose on the public as recently dis- 
covered Mss. of the ' Swan of Avon.' One of these 
finds, a play called Vortigern, was actually acted by a 
prominent company. But the unShakespearean char- 
acter of these ' great discoveries ' was soon perceived, 
and Ireland at length confessed. 

Another famous fraud of a wholly different kind 
was that of J. P. Collier. The great services which this 
man has rendered to the world of scholarship make 



212 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

all men reluctant to pass too severe censure on his 
conduct ; but it is only fair that the public should be 
warned against deception. He pretended to have found 
a folio copy of the plays corrected and revised on the 
margin in the handwriting of a contemporary of 
Shakespeare. Some of these revisions were actual im- 
provements on the carelessly printed text; but it is 
now known that they were forgeries. Similar changes 
were made by him in other important documents, and 
were for some time accepted as genuine. 

The Bacon Controversy. — During the latter part of 
the nineteenth century, the contention was started that 
Shakespeare was merely an obscure actor who never 
wrote a line, and that the Shakespearean plays were 
actually written by his great contemporary, Francis 
Bacon, who was pleased to let these products of his 
own genius appear under the name of another man. 
This delusion is usually considered as beginning with 
an article by Miss Delia Bacon in Putnam's Monthly 
(January, 1856), although the idea had been twice 
suggested during the eight years preceding. 

The Baconian arguments fall into four groups. First, 
they argue that there is no proof to establish the iden- 
tity of Shakespeare, the actor, with the author of the 
plays. This is untrue. We have more than one ref- 
erence by his contemporaries, identifying the actor 
with the poet, some so strong that the Baconians them- 
selves can explain them away only by assuming that 
the writer is speaking in irony or that he willfully de- 
ceives the public. By assumptions like that, any one 
could prove anything. 

The second point of the Baconians is that a man of 



DELUSIONS ABOUT SHAKESPEARE 213 

Shakespeare's limited education could not have written 
plays replete with so many kinds of learning. This 
argument is weak at both ends. It assumes as true 
that Shakespeare had a limited education and that his 
plays are full of knowledge learned from books rather 
than from life. The first of these points rests on 
vague tradition only, and the second is still a debat- 
able question. But even if we admit these two points, 
what then ? Shakespeare was twenty-nine years old 
and had probably lived in London for five or six years 
when the first book from his hand appeared in its pres- 
ent form. Any man capable of writing Hamlet could 
educate himself during several years in the heart of a 
great city. 

Thirdly, a certain lady found in Bacon's writings a 
large number of expressions which seemed to her to 
resemble similar phrases in Shakespeare. Except to 
the mind of an ardent Baconian many of these show 
no likeness whatever. Most of those which do show 
any likeness were proverbial or stock expressions 
which can be found in other writers. 
^ Lastly, various Baconians have repeatedly asserted 
that they had found in the First Folio acrostic signa- 
tures of Bacon's name ; that one could spell Bacon or 
Francis Bacon by picking out letters in the text ac- 
cording to certain rules. But unfortunately either 
these acrostics do not work out, or else the rules are 
so loosie that similar acrostics can be found anywhere, 
in modern books or pamphlets, and even on the grave- 
stones of our ancestors. Many of the more intelligent 
Baconians themselves have no faith in this last form 
of evidence. 



214 AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE 

On the other hand, there are certain very weighty 
objections to Bacon as author of the plays. In the 
first place, it is a miracle that one man should produce 
either the works of Bacon or Shakespeare alone ; it is 
a miracle past all belief that the same man in one life- 
time should have written both. In the second place, 
the little verse which Bacon is known to have written 
shows clearly how limited he was as a poet, no matter 
how great in other directions. Moreover, his prose, 
though splendid in its kind, is wholly unlike the prose 
of Shakespeare. Finally, Bacon's contemptuous atti- 
tude toward woman and marriage was diametrically 
opposed to that found in Shakespeare. To imagine 
that the same man wrote both sets of writings is to 
assume that he was one man one day and another the 
next. 

The advocates of this strange theory vary greatly 
in fairmindedness and ability, and it is not just to 
judge them all by the mad extremes of some ; but, 
nevertheless, their writings, taken as a whole, form one 
of the strangest medleys of garbled facts and fallacious 
reasoning which has ever imposed on an honest and 
intelligent but uninformed public. 

On the Shakespeare Apocrypha, see C. F. Tucker Brooke's 
edition of fourteen spurious plays, under this title, Oxford, Uni- 
versity Press, 1908. On the forgeries and other questions, Ap. 
pendix I of Mr. Lee's Life is the readiest place of reference. 



INDEX 



Aaron, 141. 

Abraham and Isaac, 25. 

Adoration of the Wise Men, 25. 

iEschylus, 20 

vEsop, 182. 

Albright, V. E., 44, 50. 

All is True, 207, 209. 

AUeyn, E., 48, 49. 

Allott, R., 124. 

AlVs Well that Ends Well, 110, 

121, 174-176. 
Amphitruo, 110, 148. 
Amyot, J., 108. 
Anders, H. R. D., 112. 
Angelo, 176. 
Antonio, 160. 

Antonius, Life of M., 192, 195. 
Antony, 178. 
Antony and Cleopatra, 47, 75, 83, 

102, 109, 121, 190-192, 193. 
Apemantus, 194. 
Apocrypha, Shakespeare, 120, 

210. 
ApoUonius and Silla, 171. 
Arcadia, 111, 187. 
Arden of Feversham, 211. 
Aren en Titus, 142. 
Ariel, 206. 
Ariosto, 167. 
Aristophanes, 20. 
Aristotle, 30. 
Arthur, Prince, 137. 
Ashbies, 4, 16. 
Aspley, W. A., 121, 124. 
As You Like It, 102, 110, 121, 

167-169, 172. 
Ayrer, J., 207. 

Bacon controversy, 212-214. 
Baker, G. P., 104. 
Bale, J., 138. 



Bandello, 109, 110, 144, 167, 171. 

Bankside, 37. 

Barksted, 76, 177. 

Barnard, Lady, 19. 

Bear-rings as stages, 37. 

Beatrice, 166. 

Beaumont, F., 57, 196. 

Belleforest, 171, 182. 

Bellott, Stephen, 13, 14. 

Benedick, 166. 

Benedicke and Betteris, 167, 

Bermuda, 207. 

Bertram, 174, 175. 

Besant, Sir W., 59. 

Blackfriars Theater, 14, 45-46, 

49, 57, 58. 
Blount, E., 121-123, 199. 
Boccaccio, G., 110, 176, 202. 
Boisteau, 144. 
Bolingbroke, 138. 
Book of Martyrs, 207. 
Booke of Plaies, 189. 
Boswell, J., 129. 
Boy-actors, 49. 
Bradley, A. C., 195. 
Brodmeier, 50. 
Brome play, 25. 
Brooke, A., 145. 
Brooke, C. F. T., 214. 
Brutus, 178, 179. 
Buckingham, 207. 
Building of the Arke, 25. 
Bullen (Boleyn), Anne, 207. 
Burbage, James, 37. 
Burbage, R., 12, 14, 17, 19, 37, 

38, 45, 48, 49. 
Busby, J., 118. 
Butler, N., 120. 



Ccesar, Life of J., 193 ; see also 
Julius. 



215 



216 



INDEX 



Caliban, 206. 

Camden, R., 11. 

Capell, E., 129. 

Cassius, 178. 

Caxton, W., 174. 

Chamberlain's Company, see 

Lord. 
Chambers, E. K., 34. 
Character-study, 90. 
Charlecote, 7. 
Chaucer, G., 67, 109, 151, 152, 

174, 201. 
Chester Plays, 24, 25. 
Chettle, H., 9, 12, 174. 
Chetwind, P., 125. 
Children of Paul's, 46. 
Children of the Chapel, 46. 
Children's companies, 48. 
Chronicle of Holinshed, 107-108, 

187. See also Holinshed. 
Church, Origin of drama in, 20- 

23. 
Cinthio, G., 109, 177, 184. 
Citizens of London, 55. 
City of London, 53. 
Clark, A., 4 n. 

Clark and Wright, 129, 189. 
Classical drama, 29-31. 
Claudio, 165, 177. 
Cloten, 200. 
Cock-pit, 46. 
Colin Clout, etc., 10. 
Collier, J. P., 112, 211. 
Comedy of Errors, 10, 77, 83, 

110, 121, 147-14.8. 
Condell, Henry, ]2, 19, 122. 
Confessio Amantis, 109, 200. 
Constance, 137. 

Contention, First, 111, 134, 135. 
Contention, Second, 111, 134, 

135. See Richard, True 

Tragedy of. 
Contention, Whole, 111, 120, 134. 
Cordelia, 185. 

Coriolanus, 109, 121, 192-193. 
Coryat, T., 39. 



Cotes, R., 124. 
Cotes, T., 124. 
Cranmer, 208. 
Creizenach, 34, 50. 
Cromwell, Thos., Lord, 125, 211. 
Curtainl'heater, 37. 
Cycles of miracle plays, 24. 
Cymbeline, 41, 71, 83, 103, 108, 
112, 121, 200-202. 

Danter, J., 118. 

Dates of plays, 83. 

Davies, Archdeacon, 7. 

De Clerico et Puella, 28. 

Decameron, 110, 176, 202. 

Deer-stealing, tradition of, 7. 

Dekker, T., 174. 

Delius, N., 129. 

Deluge, The, 25. 

Desdemona, 184. 

Diana Enamorada, 110, 149, 151. 

Dogberry, 54, 166. 

Dorastus and Fawnia, 204. 

Dowden, E., 84. 

Drama before Shakespeare, 20. 

Dramatic technique, 94—100. 

Drayton, M., 11. 

Droeshout, M., 18. 

Dromio, 147. 

Dux Moraud, 28. 

Easter drama, 22. 

Eden, 207. 

Editing, Problems of, 126-127. 

Edmund, 186. 

Edward II, 32, 140. 

Edward III, 211. 

Edward IV, 134. 

Ely Palace portrait, 18. 

End-stopped lines, 79-80. 

Endymion, 33. 

Essex, Earl of, 78, 159. 

Euphues, 33, 140. 

Euripides, 20. 

Everyman, 26, 34. 

Every Man in his Humour, 12. 



INDEX 



217 



Every Man out of his Humour, 

158, 179. 
External evidence, 75-77. 

Faerie Queene, 152, 187. 

Fair Em, 211. 

Falstaff, Sir John, 7, 156-159, 

164. 
Faiilconbridge, 137. 
Faustus, 32. 

Felix and Philiomena, 149. 
Female parts, 48. 
Feminine endings, 80. 
Field, Henry, 16. 
Field, Richard, 113. 
Fiorentino, G., 110, 161. 
First Folio, 11, 30, 75, 114, 119, 

120-124, 136, 137, etc. 
Fisher, T., 120. 
Fleay, F. L., 50, 84. 
Fletcher, J., 2, 196, 197, 209. 
Florio, G., 207. 
Flower portrait, 18. 
Fluellen, 158. 
Folios, Second, Third, and 

Fourth, 124-125. 
Forgeries, Shakespeare, 211. 
Forman, Dr. S., 189, 202, 204. 
Fortune Theater, 38-40. 
Four periods, 101-104. 
Foxe, R., 209. 
Fuller, H. De W., 142. 
Fuller, T., 56. 
Furness, H. H., 127, 130. 

Gamelyn, Tale of, 169. 
Gammer Gurton's Needle, 29. 
Garnett, H., 189. 
Gascoigne, G., 163. 
Geoffrey of Monmouth, 187. 
German and Dutch plays like 

Shakespeare's, 112. 
Gesta Romanorum, 200. 
Glendower, 155. 
Globe Theater, 1, 38, 39, 57, 

58. 



Gloucester, 186. 

Gorboduc, 29. 

Gosson, S., 161. 

Gower, J., 109, 200. 

Greek drama, 30. 

Greene, R., 8, 9, 110, 115, 134, 

135, 204. 
Greene, T., 17, 31. 
Grey, W., 50, 120. 
Groatsworth of Witte, etc., 9. 
Gunpowder Plot, 190. 

Hal, Prince, 155. 
Hall, Dr. J., 17. 
HalliweU-Phillipps, J. O., 19, 

129. 
Hamlet, 12, 32, 33, 34, 41, 83, 

93-94, 100, 102, 111, 112, 

116, 117, 119, 121, 128, 142, 

177, 180-182. 
Hanmer, T., 128. 
Harsnett, 186. 
Hart, Joan, 19. 
Hathaway, Anne, 5, 6. 
Hawkins, A., 124. 
Hazlitt, W. C., 112. 
Heccatommithi, Gli, 109, 179, 

184. 
Hector, 173. 
Hegge plays, 24. 
Helena, 174. 
Heminge or Hemings, J., 12, 19, 

122. 
Henley Street House, 19. 
/ Henry IV, 6, 10, 33, 41, 83, 99, 

101, 111, 117, 119, 121, 154- 

157, 164, 165, 208. 
II Henry IV, 121, 126, 167-158. 
Henry V, 78, 83, 101, 111, 117, 

119, 120, 158-159, 165. 
Henry V, Famous Victories of, 

111. 
/ Henry VI, 111, 133-134. 

II Henry VI, 111, 117, 134-135. 

III Henry VI, 8, 83, 98, 121, 
134-135. 



218 



INDEX 



Henry VIII, 31, 84, 103, 112, 

121, 197, 207-209. 
Henslowe, P., 37, 45, 48. 
Henslowe's Diary, 50, 182. 
Heptameron of Civil Discourses, 

177. 
Hermia, 150. 
Hermione, 203. 
Hero, 166. 
Herod, 24. 
Hey wood, J., 28. 
Histoires Tragiques, 182. 
Historia Danica, 181. 
Histories, 97-98. 
Holinshed, 107-108, 134, 136, 

140, 156, 159, 180, 190, 202, 

209. 
Holland (author), 184. 
Horace, 11. 
Hotspur, 155. 
Hubert, 137. 

Humphrey of Gloucester, 134. 
Hunsdon, Lord, 48, 144. 

lachimo, 202. 
lago, 183. 

Iambic pentameter, 61. 
Imogen, 200-202. 
Ingannati, GV , 171. 
Ingram, 81 n. 
Inn-yards as theaters, 35. 
Interludes, 27-29, 48. 
Internal evidence, 77-82. 
Ireland, W. H., 211. 
Isabella, 176. 
Italian novelle, 109-110. 
Italy, Influence of, on masque, 
34. 

Jaggard, I., 121, 124. 

Jaggard, W., 70, 113, 120-121, 

124. 
James I, 48, 209. 
Jaques, 169. 
Jessica, 160. 
Jew of Malta, 132. 



Joan of Arc, 133. 

John of Gaunt, 138, 140. 

John, Troublesome Reigne of, 111, 

137-138. 
Johnson, A., 120. 
Johnson, S., 129. 
Jonson, Ben, 11, 12, 31, 34, 60, 

56, 158, 174, 179, 204. 
Jourdan, S., 207. 
Julia, 149. 
Julius CcBsar, 44, 83, 100, 102, 

109, 121, 122, 126, 172, 177- 

180, 184, 190, 193. 

Katherine, 162, 208. 

Kemp, W., 12. 

Kind-Harts Dreame, 9. 

King Johan, 27, 138. 

King John, 11, 77, 83, 111, 135, 

1S6-138. 
King Lear, 77, 83, 100, 102, 108, 

117, 126, 185-187, 195. 
King Leir, etc.. Ill, 187. 
Knight's Tale, 151. 
Kyd, T., 31, 32, 142, 182. 

Lady Macbeth, 188. 

Lambert, D., 84. 

Lee, S., 19, 72, 214. 

Legend of Good Women, 152. 

Leontes, 199, 204. 

Leopold Shakespeare, 129. 

Locrine, Tragedy of, 125, 211. 

Lodge, T., 31, 111, 135, 169. 

London, 51-59. 

London Prodigal, A., 125, 211. 

Lord Admiral's Men, 45, 48. 

Lord Chamberlain's Company, 

12, 48. 
Lounsbury, T. R., 130. 
Love's Labour's Lost, 10, 33, 77, 

83, 91, 95, 99, 101, 106, 117, 

121, 132, 145-146. 
Love's Labour's Wonne, 10, 77, 

175. 
Lover's Complaint, A, 70. 



INDEX 



219 



Lucian, 195. 

Lucrece, Rape of, 10, 62-63, 67, 

113. 
Lucy, Sir T., 7. 
Ludus Coventrice, see Hegge. 
Luigi da Porto, 144. 
Lydgate, J., 33. 

Lyly, J., 32, 132, 135, 145-146. 
Lysander, 150. 

Macbeth, 41, 44, 83, 92, 100, 

102, 103, 108, 121, 187-190, 

191, 202. 
Malone, E., 129, 184, 207. 
Malvolio, 170. 
Manly, J. M., 34. 
Manningham, J., diary, 76, 171. 
Marina, 197, 198. 
Marlowe, C, 2, 31-32, 132, 135, 

136, 140, 153, 163. 
Masculine endings, 80. 
Masque, 33. 
Masque of Oberon, 204. 
Mass, Drama at, 21. 
Measure for Measure, 76, 83, 

109, 112, 121, 176-177. 
Meighen, 124, 
Menaechmi, 110. 
Menander, 20. 
Mennes, Sir J., 3. 
Merchant of Venice, 10, 42, 44, 

77, 83, 96, 97, 101, 110, 112, 

117, 120, 132, 133, 159-161. 
Mercutio, 144. 
Meres, F., 10, 67 n., 76-77, 137, 

142, 149, 151, 156, 161, 167, 

169, 171, 175, 179. 
Merry Devil of Edmonton, 211. 
Merry Wives of Windsor, 110, 

117, 118, 120, 124, 163-165. 
Meter, 86-87. 
Middle Temple, 171. 
Middleton, T., 189. 
Midsummer NighVs Dream, 10, 

77, 83, 117, 120, 132, 133, 

149-151. 



Milton, J., 64, 65. 

Miracle plays, 23. 

Miranda, 206. 

Mirrour for Magistrates, 187. 

Mirrour of Martyrs, 179. 

Montaigne, Essays of, 207. 

Montemayor, J. de, 149. 

Moralities, 26-27. 

More, Sir T., 136. See under 

Sir. 
Mountjoy, C, 13-14. 
Mountjoy, Mary, 13. 
Much Ado About Nothing, 71, 

83, 101, 110, 121, 165-167, 

169. 
Myrrha, 177. 

Nash, T., 8, 31, 135, 182. 
Nashe, T., 19. 

Neilson, W. A., 129, 135, 205. 
New Place, 16, 17. 
News out of Purgatorie, 165. 
Nice Wanton, 27. 
North, Sir T., 108, 158, 179, 192, 
193. 

Oberon, 149. 
Octavia, 190. 
Oldcastle, Sir John, 120, 125, 

211. 
Olivia, 170. 
Orator, The, 161. 
Order of the plays, 83. 
Ordish, T. F., 59. 
Orlando, 168. 
Orlando Furioso, 167. 
Othello, 100, 101, 109, 117, 124, 

182-185, 191. 
Ovid, 61, 152. 

Pageants, 25. 

Painter, W., 110, 148, 176, 195. 

Palace of Pleasure, 110, 195. 

See Painter. 
Palladis Tamia, 10, 77. 
Pandarus, 172. 



220 



INDEX 



Pandosto, 110, 204. 

Passionate Pilgrim, 70, 71, 113. 

Patterne of Painful Adventures, 

200. 
Pavier, T., 120-121, 124. 
Pavy, S., 50. 
Pecorone, II, 110. 
Peele, G., 8, 31, 135. 
Pembroke, Earl of, 67. 
Perdita, 199, 203. 
Pericles, 103, 109, 117, 119, 120, 

128, 129, 197-200. 
Petrarch, 64. 
Petruchio, 162. 

Phoenix and the Turtle, The, 70. 
Pistol, 158, 159. 
Plautus, 10, 11, 29, 110, 148. 
Pliny, 184. 
Plots, 106. 
Plutarch's Lives, 108-109, 179, 

192, 193, 195. 
Poetaster, 174. 
Pollard, A. W., 120. 
Polonius, 181. 
Pope, A., 127, 128. 
Popish Impostures, Declaration 

of, 186. 
Portia, 160, 179. 
Posthumus, 200. 
Printing, Conditions of, 114- 

116. 
Private theaters, 45. 
Promos and Cassandra, 112, 177. 
Prospero, 199, 206. 
Proteus, 149. 

Puck (Robin Goodfellow), 149. 
Puritaine, The, 125, 211. 
Puritan Widow, v.s. 
Puritans, 15. 
Pyramus and Thisbe, 150, 152. 

Quartos, 114, 
Quiney, T., 17. 

Ralph Roister Doister, 29. 
Rare Triumphs, etc., 202. 



Reformation, 52. 
Renaissance, 21, 29. 
Reynolds, G. F., 50. 
Richard, Duke of York, True 

Tragedy of, 134. Same as // 

Contention, q.v. 
Richard II, 10, 77, 83, 117, 119, 

121, 137, 138-140, 154. 
Richard III, 10, 32, 77, 83, 91, 

92, 98-99, 101, 111, 117, 119, 

121, 133, 135-186, 137. 
Richardus Tertius, 136. 
Richard III, True Tragedy of, 

111, 136. 
Riche, B., 171. 
Rime, 81-82, 87-88. 
Roberts, J., 120. 
Robertson, W., 142. 
Robin Hood, 28, 167. 
Rome, 21. 

Romeo and Giulietta, 144. 
Romeo and Juliet, 11, 41, 42, 71, 

77, 83, 90, 101, 112, 116, 117- 

119, 121, 122, 131, 132, 1J,3- 

146, 150, 185. 
Romeus and Juliet, 145. 
Roofs on theaters, 46. 
Rosalind, 166. 
Rosalynde, 110, 169, 171. 
Rose Theater, 37, 135. 
Rowe, N., 7, 127. 
Rowley, W., 200. 
Run on lines, 79 ff. 
Rutland, Earl of, 17. 

St. Paul's, 13, 56. 

Salisbury Court, 46. 

Saxo Grammaticus, 182. 

Schelling, F. E., 34, 50, 135. 

School of Abuse, 161. 

Second Shepherd's Play, 25. 

Sejanus, 12. 

Seneca, 10, 20, 29, 30. 

Sequence, see Sonnet. 

Sequence of plays, 83. 

Shakespeare Allusion Book, II n. 



INDEX 



221 



Shakespeare, Hamnet, 5, 6, 17. 

Shakespeare, John, 3, 4, 6, 16, 
17. 

Shakespeare, Judith, 5, 17, 18, 
19. 

Shakespeare, Richard, 4. 

Shakespeare, Susanna, 5, 17, 19. 

Shakespeare, WilHam, our 
knowledge of his life, 1 ; 
birth, 2 ; education, 4 ; mar- 
riage, 5 ; deer-stealing, 7 ; 
life in London, 8-16 ; return 
to Stratford, 16; death, 17; 
portraits, tomb, will, 18 ; de- 
scendants, 19 ; allusions to, 
8-17 ; as an actor, 12 ; resi- 
dence with Mountjoy, 13 ; 
income, 15 ; grant of arms to, 
16; compared with Jonson, 
56 ; and passim. 

Shakespearean Tragedy, 195. 

Shallow, 7, 158. 

Shottery, 6. 

Shylock, 92-93, 159, 160. 

Sidea, Die Schone, 207. 

Sidney, Sir P., Ill, 115, 187. 

Silvayn, A., 161. 

Silver Street, 13. 

Silvia, 149. 

Sims, v., 119. 

^ir Andrew, 170. 

Sly, 162. 

Smethwick, I., 121-124. 

Somers, Sir G., 78. 

Sonnets, 63-70, 113. 

Sophocles, 20. 

Southampton, Earl of, 10, 67- 
68. 

Spanish Tragedy, 32, 182. 

Spenser, E., 10, 187. 

Stage, The, 40-45. 

Stage costumes and settings, 
42-44. 

Stage, Effect of, on drama, 46. 

Stationers' Register, 75, 114- 
115, 118, etc. 



Steevens, G., 129. 
Stephenson, H. T., 59. 
Strachey, W., 207. 
Strange, Lord, 48, 135. 
Straparola, 110. 
Stratford, 2. 
Supposes, 163. 
Surrey, Earl of, 65. 
Swan Theater, 37. 

Talbot, 133. 

Tamhurlaine, 32, 136. 

Taming of a Shrew, 112, 121, 

163. 
Taming of the Shrew, 83, 111, 

161-163. 
Tamora, 141. 
Tarlton, 165. 
Taste, growth of, 89-90. 
Taverns, 56-57. 
Tempest, The, 34, 41, 71, 78, 81, 

84, 87, 103, 121, 136, 205-207. 
Terence, 29. 
Tha'isa, 198. 
Thames, 54. 
Theater, The, 37. 
Theaters, 35 ff., 57-59. 
Theobald, L., 128. 
Thomas More, Sir, 211. 
Thorpe, T., 113. 
Three Ladies of London, 205. 
Timon (by Lucian), 195. 
Timon of Athens, 109, 112, 121, 

122, 193-195. 
Titania, 149. 
Tito Andronico, 142. 
Tittus and Vespacia, 142. 
Titus Andronicus, 11, 32, 77, 83, 

117, 119, 123, 132, 141-143. 
Touchstone, 166. 
Towneley plays, 24, 25. 
Travaile, History of, 207. 
Tredici Piacevole Notte, 110. 
Troilus and Cressida, 117, 122, 

172-174, 195. 
Troilus and Criseyde, 109, 174. 



222 



INDEX 



Troye, Recuyell of, 174. 
Twelfth Night, 6, 76, 83, 101, 

110, 112, 121, 169-171, 172, 

174. 
Twine, L., 200. 
Two Gentlemen of Verona, 10, 71, 

77, 83, 96, 101, 110, 112, 121, 

148-149. 
Two Noble Kinsmen, 211. 
Tyrwhitt, 129. 

Udall, N., 29. 

Unities, Three dramatic, 30 n. 

Valentine, 149. 

Venus and Adonis, 10, 16, 61, 

63, 67, 113. 
Viola, 170. 
V or tig em, 211. 

Wagner {Death of Siegfried), 23. 
Wakefield, see Towneley. 



Wallace, Prof. C. W., 13, 14, 19. 

Warburton, 128. 

Weak endings, 81. 

Weever, J., 11, 179. 

Westminster, 54. 

Whetstone, G., 112, 177. 

White, R. G., 129. 

Wilkins, G., 200. 

Wilson, R., 205. 

Winter's Tale, The, 34, 80, 83, 

103, 110, 112, 121, 202-206. 
Wolsey, 208. 
Worcester, 155. 
Wotton, Sir H., 209. 
Wyatt, Sir T., 65. 

Yonge, B., 149. 
York and Lancaster, 134. 
York plays, 24. 

Yorkshire Tragedy, A., 120, 125, 
211. 



r-^ 



Printed in the United States of America. 



oo 



A 



;e— 



^5 ^c^ - 








0^ ^v.0,% '«-^ 



v^ 



^ 











,0 o 



^> '^ -'^ ^ -^ 






^6 






^. c,"^ 




'^ ^ '^ Deacidified using the Bookkeeper proces: 

"^ *^ - Neutralizing agent: iVlagnesium Oxide 
■^ "^ Treatment Date: Feb. 2009 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVATIOi 

~^^ V <i rt ^^^ Thomson Park Drive 

^••' ■?- Cranberry Township, PA 16066 

'^ ^ .<? ta (724)779-2111 




■^' ,A 



'^ 



A^' 



. . ^>. "^ ... s^ ^^ 



.0 o 



^^ 














.^^^'-^o 



^^ ^ 



'"oo 



.<•!«»>/ ^i-- 






,0o^ 

















-.^' 






Q-, '- 



■^: 









.^ 







